amuck-landowner

A20-OLinuXino-LIME

wlanboy

Content Contributer
Yesterday a local retrailer sold the A20-OLinuXino-LIME for €20 and I could not resist to get a replacement for my Raspberry Pi.

A20-OLinuXino-LIME.jpg

The essentail parts of the package:

  • Allwinner A20 dual core Cortex-A7 processor @1Ghz
  • Allwinner dual-core Mali 400 GPU
  • 512MB DDR3 RAM memory
  • SATA connector with 5V SATA power jack
  • Capable of FullHD (1080p) video playback
  • HDMI connector
  • 2 x USB High-speed host with power control and current limiter
  • USB-OTG with power control and current limiter
  • 100MBit native Ethernet
  • LiPo Battery connector with battery-charging capabilities
  • 160 GPIOs on four GPIO connectors
  • MicroSD card connector
  • DEBUG-UART connector for console debug with USB-SERIAL-CABLE-F

Looks like I found a cheap and capable replacement for my Raspberry Pi.

Main pros:

  • Dedicated GPU
  • Dedicated USB Hosts
  • Dedicated LAN (!!!)
  • Dedicated SATA
  • 160 GPIOs (!!!)
Currently downloading the Debian image via Torrent. Community support is not as good as on the Raspberry Pi but found enough samples for cross compiling the kernel.
Still cautious how well Allwinner and Debian (not talking about FreeBSD :-( ) supports this board.

I will update this thread once everything is working.
 

MannDude

Just a dude
vpsBoard Founder
Moderator
Ohhh I really like that. Would be nice at 1024MB of RAM but the rest of the features are great. What are your plans with this unit?
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Snap.  

Some parts Raspberry Pi 2 excels at.  Others, I guess the a20 olinuxino lime beats it on.

Good luck mate and yeah definitely let us know how it is.  
 

wlanboy

Content Contributer
Ohhh I really like that. Would be nice at 1024MB of RAM but the rest of the features are great. What are your plans with this unit?

The Lime version 2 does have 1 GB RAM. 
My plans are quite simple: "Extended USB stick".
Encrypted sd card containing my main Linux desktop [SSH/SCP/OpenVPN/SVN/Browser/Emails(IMAP)]
Plug into any PC, ssh into it and resume work.
 

AuroraZero

Active Member
Hmmm looks like I could get one of these to replace my satellite and have cheap TV. Would work great to stream Hulu, Netflix, etc... Pffft I would have to order it the vendors near me do not carry anything remotely cool. Only run of the mill garbage that is way over priced. Some of it is out dated and still over priced. That is what I get for living in a remote area I suppose, but I can no longer stand metropolises.
 

wlanboy

Content Contributer
Snap.  

Some parts Raspberry Pi 2 excels at.  Others, I guess the a20 olinuxino lime beats it on.

Good luck mate and yeah definitely let us know how it is.  

Maybe I will get a Raspberry Pi 2 too. Currently benchmarking the A20 vs the original Raspberry Pi:

  • sysbench --test=cpu --num-threads=4 runA20
    Code:
    sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
    
    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 4
    
    Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
    Threads started!
    Done.
    
    Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000
    
    
    Test execution summary:
        [B]total time:                          136.2003s
    [/B]
        total number of events:              10000
        total time taken by event execution: 544.7097
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                 26.93ms
             avg:                                 54.47ms
             max:                                 88.79ms
             approx.  95 percentile:              66.90ms
    
    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/25.01
        execution time (avg/stddev):   136.1774/0.01
  • RP1
    Code:
    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 4
    
    Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
    Threads started!
    Done.
    
    Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000
    
    
    Test execution summary:
        [B]total time:                          533.9002s[/B]
        total number of events:              10000
        total time taken by event execution: 2135.1263
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                129.38ms
             avg:                                213.51ms
             max:                                420.98ms
             approx.  95 percentile:             337.86ms
    
    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/0.00
        execution time (avg/stddev):   533.7816/0.06
[*]sysbench --test=memory --memory-block-size=1M --memory-total-size=100M --num-threads=4 run
  • A20
    Code:
    sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark
    
    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 4
    
    Doing memory operations speed test
    Memory block size: 1024K
    
    Memory transfer size: 100M
    
    Memory operations type: write
    Memory scope type: global
    Threads started!
    Done.
    
    Operations performed: 100 ( 1025.02 ops/sec)
    
    100.00 MB transferred (1025.02 MB/sec)
    
    
    Test execution summary:
        [B]total time:                          0.0976s
    [/B]
        total number of events:              100
        total time taken by event execution: 0.3545
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                  0.95ms
             avg:                                  3.55ms
             max:                                 23.16ms
             approx.  95 percentile:              21.90ms
    
    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           25.0000/14.51
        execution time (avg/stddev):   0.0886/0.01
  • RP1
    Code:
    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 4
    
    Doing memory operations speed test
    Memory block size: 1024K
    
    Memory transfer size: 100M
    
    Memory operations type: write
    Memory scope type: global
    Threads started!
    Done.
    
    Operations performed: 100 (  341.23 ops/sec)
    
    100.00 MB transferred (341.23 MB/sec)
    
    
    Test execution summary:
        [B]total time:                          0.2931s
    [/B]
        total number of events:              100
        total time taken by event execution: 1.0973
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                  2.69ms
             avg:                                 10.97ms
             max:                                 52.81ms
             approx.  95 percentile:              32.86ms
    
    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           25.0000/0.00
        execution time (avg/stddev):   0.2743/0.01
 
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