Orion O6 Debug Party Invitation

It looks I was wrong about the cause of the problems it’s looking like segfaults occur when setting the cpu speed to 2.6 instead of 2.5 otherwise it’s all good.

This is a kernel I compiled basically you copy the Image and initramfs-linux.img to /boot and copy the 6.14.x directory to /lib/modules , there’s an example grub.cfg there that usually goes in /boot/grub/ but you’d need to change the UUID that’s in there if you want to use it

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BredOS coming soon very soon near your local bakery! (Full gpu acceleration!!!)



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Very keen to test.
Thanks in advance
uli

I remember seeing in December back when I ordered that this had a TPM support.

Welp, Im unable to see it now either on the page or on the docs anywhere.

On APCI mode, tpm is not detected and I cant see it on the boards as well. I truly remember it saying tpm (desoldered) so it was a tpm module that you could remove and replace by others…

Anyone remembers that or is able to see the module somehere, maybe on devicetree mode?

If they drop that from the public materials…they totally screwed us as its the sole reason we bougth it, arm board wtih TPM and secureboot…

Also, has anybody been able to set secureboot in ACPI mode, on setup mode? I cant for the life of me get it working, unless I manually enable it and add the keys…

Hello,
Here desoldered means that it isn’t on the board but pads are available so out-of-the-box there is no TPM

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Have I been stupid and missed power usage on this board? Or if not cans omeone at least least mention min/max wall power w/at least the base board?

THANK YOU!

[EDIT]

Information is for my PERSONAL USE, so don’t get excited… or exercised…

[/EDIT]

Chip is rated 30W tdp, no clue about package / board power use tho.

https://dl.radxa.com/orion/o6/hw/radxa_orion_o6_v1.20_schematic.pdf page 32

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North of 10W in idle.

Which is an indication of “something being wrong”. There’s something seriously broken and I wonder when something will be released that fixes this. Until then the O6 will be collecting dust.

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Can confirm, basically it’s minimum 10w, using all cpu cores its pretty much under 30w, i’m not sure how high it goes with all cpu + all gpu. If they somehow find a way to address the high idle this soc would be huge but even if they don’t i’d say this soc is still very strong to use right now for i/o / cpu tasks. The main competitor you’d think would be intel based stuff and they idle at at least 7w or so ? It definitely competes really well there with the 2 x 5g ethernet, working pcie and strong usb. This soc is pretty much good to go for stuff that doesnt require the ai / gpu, the latest kernel works with a few patches.

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Nope, an idle system that is designed properly doesn’t need to consume energy. The only non-server Intel hardware around here idles at 2.5W.

But it’s not about comparing numbers, the +10W in idle is a simple indication that there’s something seriously wrong (most probably at the firmware layer which is all closed source so nobody other than Radxa or Cix could have a look and they both don’t seem to care).

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The Realtek NICs probably consume a significant amount of idle power. They probably stay hot to the touch constantly. If they didn’t it would be the first 5/10gb NIC I’ve seen that doesn’t put out massive heat.

I tested this a while ago on Rock 5B but don’t find the numbers right now.

So tested this again one time measuring with two RTL8126 and one time with three (got a M.2 variant for 10 bucks back then some months ago):

This is with two NICs, two SSD and some peripherals:

sh-5.2# Netio=powerbox-1/3 sbc-bench.sh -m
Power monitoring on socket 3 of powerbox-1 (Netio 4KF, FW v4.0.5, XML API v2.4, 232.44V @ 50.02Hz)

Cix P1/CD8180, Kernel: aarch64, Userland: arm64

CPU sysfs topology (clusters, cpufreq members, clockspeeds)
                 cpufreq   min    max
 CPU    cluster  policy   speed  speed   core type
  0        0        0      800    2600   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
  1        0        1      800    1800   Cortex-A520 / r0p1
  2        0        1      800    1800   Cortex-A520 / r0p1
  3        0        1      800    1800   Cortex-A520 / r0p1
  4        0        1      800    1800   Cortex-A520 / r0p1
  5        0        5      800    2300   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
  6        0        5      800    2300   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
  7        0        7      800    2200   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
  8        0        7      800    2200   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
  9        0        9      800    2500   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
 10        0        9      800    2500   Cortex-A720 / r0p1
 11        0        9      800    2500   Cortex-A720 / r0p1

Thermal source: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone9/ (thermal-zone4)

Time       cpu0/cpu1/cpu5/cpu7/cpu9    load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq   Temp      mW
04:30:59:  800/ 800/1500/ 800/1500MHz  3.91   3%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  25.0°C    16200
04:31:04: 1800/1800/ 800/1500/1500MHz  3.92   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  24.0°C    15800
04:31:09:  800/1800/1200/1500/1800MHz  3.93   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  24.0°C    15720
04:31:14: 1800/1800/ 800/1800/1800MHz  3.93   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  24.0°C    15690
04:31:19: 1800/1800/1800/1500/1800MHz  3.94   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  24.0°C    15680

Now adding the 3rd same NIC via adapter to the PCIe slot:

Time       cpu0/cpu1/cpu5/cpu7/cpu9    load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq   Temp      mW
04:34:21:  800/1800/1500/1500/1800MHz  3.53   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  26.0°C    17980
04:34:26:  800/1800/ 800/1500/1800MHz  3.56   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  26.0°C    17880
04:34:32:  800/1800/ 800/ 800/1200MHz  3.60   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  26.0°C    17730
04:34:37:  800/1800/1500/1500/ 800MHz  3.79   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  26.0°C    17670
04:34:42: 1500/1800/ 800/1500/1800MHz  3.81   1%   0%   0%   0%   0%   1%  26.0°C    17600

As such less than 2W per NIC unconnected. We’re still talking about ~5W too much in idle.

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true, my n97 hardkernel h4 idles at less than 10W(wall), but CAN peak when unlimited at ~30W (wall, just 1 stick DDR5, nvme, have not stress tested w/multiple spinning rust drives, although I do have one up and running as a nas, but it is set to default power limit which is IIRC ~13W… that unit is an h4+(has 4x SATA ports and 2x2.5Gbps ether, non plus misses 1x 2.5Gbps ether and has no SATA popped, it’s going to be a router w/a 4x5Gbps ether netcard 3 running opnsense, I had THOUGHT of using it as a lightweight desktop, but… reasons… too light for my use case mostly, but only barely… I could use it if I had to, but I don’t so nope. I also tried an rk3588 similar config and it was about the same but with worse linux/sw support.)

Whoops, sorry, I guess that this should have been a separate thread. Thanks for all the info though.

[EDIT]

hardkernel netcard 3 has only heatsinks on the drivers for their 5Gbps ether, if you look at their site, they do do VERY DETAILED analyses, power temp and throughput.

n97 the DDR5 SODIMM uses several Watts and nvmes basically use similar power to spinning rust drives.

RK3588 board w/nVME and 16GB LPDDR5(can’t remember if x or not offhand) idles at c. 5W and peaked c. 13-14W. I think H4(non plus) peaked at the ‘13W’ of 23W watt power, but I need to recheck those numbers as I may be confusing it w/‘unlocked’ power which IIRC is c. 30W, plus I need to do more UEFI updates as hardkernel has released a few since I did the test running/2w use, but Im pretty certain that it will be an opnsense box w/netcard 3 and an eMMC boot, wifi router -> AP hanging off the side of it.)

[/EDIT]

This is not longer a phone or tv box SoC soldered into a board and call it a “SBC”. A full fledged desktop-class SoC is going to consume like one. You just cant do magic, all the I/O at SoC level uses power.

What may be happening here is that there is some bug in the firmware and some component is not put into sleep when not used, but i dont expect it to match other ARM boards.

Something like an 5600G(still inferior in I/O by a lot) uses no less than 20W at idle.

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Of course it’s not anything like that, but still it could be just better and closed firmware would not help much,
On Rock 5B I could get 2-3x times more power consumption on idle just by using right kernel. Hopefully we would get needed sources and some optimizations, 5W idle is possible on i/o rich x86, so Why not here? One component can ruin whole setup.

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I totally agree that it would be awesome if it was lower but I disagree that its ‘collecting dust’ level. This soc is actually very reliable with the i/o, the usb works well, 4 x 10g ports

Here is a pic for the hell of it, I replaced the cooler with the next step up, probably not worth it, and I put it in a small mini-itx case, it’s too small for the back plate to go in but still pretty happy for what I paid.

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This always depends on Your expectation and reality,
If You plan to replace Your current setup, let’s say Rock 5B, and idle power consumption is 7x higher (1.5W vs 10W) then You may just hold off for some time (dust…). I perfectly understand @tkaiser, maybe he needs it for some service, running 24/7, maybe NAS? and maybe his electric bill is way to high in his area.
Gamer will see it differently, desktop user too.

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Nope, I want to review this thing. But not in this state since the software side of things is not ready and especially idle consumption is laughable. And since I fear the board gets fried it will collect dust until a firmware fix is released.

I can’t remember when it was that I used my daily driver with an idle consumption that high… maybe 2 decades ago still on PowerPC?

Just remembered that I’ve another Intel thingy lying around. A five years old MacBook Pro relying on a Core i7-9750H (6 cores, 12 threads) which was my main desktop half a decade ago (replaced by a M1 Pro and since a year the slowest Apple M3 available since ‘way too fast for me’).

Powered it on with exactly same 96W power brick as the O6 was measured with, waited until the battery was fully charged, turned the backlight off and looked at idle consumption: 3W in idle.

macbookpro-tk:~ tk$ pmset -g ps
Now drawing from 'AC Power'
 -InternalBattery-0 (id=6357091)	100%; charged; 0:00 remaining present: true

macbookpro-tk:~ tk$ pmset -g ac
 Wattage = 60W
 Current = 3000mA
 Voltage = 20000mV
 AdapterID = 28674
 Manufacturer = Apple Inc.
 Family Code = 0xe000400a
 Serial String = C4H218305PJPM0WAP
 Adapter Name = 96W USB-C Power Adapter
 Hardware Version = 1.0
 Firmware Version = 01080053

macbookpro-tk:~ tk$ system_profiler -detailLevel mini SPHardwareDataType
Hardware:

    Hardware Overview:

      Model Name: MacBook Pro
      Model Identifier: MacBookPro16,1
      Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Core i7
      Processor Speed: 2,6 GHz
      Number of Processors: 1
      Total Number of Cores: 6
      L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
      L3 Cache: 12 MB
      Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
      Memory: 16 GB
      System Firmware Version: 2069.80.3.0.0 (iBridge: 22.16.13034.5.1,0)
      OS Loader Version: 577.140.2~30

That thing has 4 Thunderbolt3 ports (up to 40 Gpbs) and adding to the integrated GPU an additional Radeon Pro 5300M (no idea about the performance since for me it’s ‘fast enough’ since decades).

3W in idle measured with the same power brick as powering my O6. All the babbling about ‘desktop class ARM CPU needs to consume moar’ is such an insane BS since wasting energy is a task for morons.

Stuff like power management has been invented decades ago and there exists absolutely no reason why something equipped with plenty of PCIe lanes should consume lots of power when nothing is connected. What those ‘gamers’ might oversee is their stupid PC setups wasting hundreds watts of energy always needing a beefy ATX PSU that is insanely inefficient at low-load scenarios so those ‘20W in idle’ are mostly caused by an overkill PSU.

O6 will be collecting further dust until a firmware fix is available… I don’t want to fry this nice board.

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All PCIe devices come up with ASPM disabled (LnkCtl: ASPM Disabled). This might be an area for improvement on the power front.