Odroid N2 RT kernel readiness?

[justin White]

As I mentioned in another post, I'm a big fan of this SBC, It's got the most powerful consumer ARM chip I've used and there seems to be a major interest in bringing the board into the mainline kernel, which may be well on it's way by now. I haven't had the time to try building an RT-preempt kernel for it and I honestly have never had much lick with patching ARM kernels anyway. I inquired on the Odroid forums about a RT kernel prior to the 5.1 release and I believe someone said that once RT kernel patches caught up to 5.2 it would be possible. Patches are at 5.2.14 now. I was thinking that this board runnng hm2 over SPI would be pretty major. I'd assume with Mesa's recent support for the RaspberryPI over SPI this may be a little more realistic now. I'm not the guy to be digging into software and kernel developement, I'm just curious if any of the Machinekit wizards think this is worth looking into.

Odroid N2

Mainline Kernel discussion.

[ce...@tuta.io]

Sep 18, 2019, 01:48 by blaz...@gmail.com:

> As I mentioned in another post, I'm a big fan of this SBC, It's got the most powerful consumer ARM chip I've used and there seems to be a major interest in bringing the board into the mainline kernel, which may be well on it's way by now. I haven't had the time to try building an RT-preempt kernel for it and I honestly have never had much lick with patching ARM kernels anyway. I inquired on the Odroid forums about a RT kernel prior to the 5.1 release and I believe someone said that once RT kernel patches caught up to 5.2 it would be possible. Patches are at 5.2.14 now. I was thinking that this board runnng hm2 over SPI would be pretty major. I'd assume with Mesa's recent support for the RaspberryPI over SPI this may be a little more realistic now. I'm not the guy to be digging into software and kernel developement, I'm just curious if any of the Machinekit wizards think this is worth looking into.
>

> Odroid N2 <https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram/>
>
> Mainline Kernel discussion. <https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=176&t=33993&start=350>
>
Isn't that that Android TV stick chipset? If so, there are going to be many different boards. True, they will be targeted to other uses and so will probably not have the broken GPIOs, but still. Maybe it will create bigger traction for RT capable kernel development.

C.

[justin White]

I’m not sure what device the s922x is used in but yes, it’s meant for an Android set top....then again that’s exactly what the RK3399 is designed for, hence the Mali gpu’s. Almost anything running a Mali GPU is meant for an Androidtv box or phone. What’s important is the ARM cores on the chip which if you look into it the 4xA73+2xA53 is one of the strongest consumer ARM soc arrangements out at the moment. I think it’s not difficult at this point for someone who knows what they’re doing to get a working kernel patched for the thing. I don’t think kernel 5.2 needed many if any hardware patched that would prevent an RT patch from applying clean-ish. I just get lost trying to fix the mismatches myself, and I hate dealing with ARM tool chains and compilers.

The one advantage of the rk3399 boards seems to be the number of PCIE lanes that were available to be broken out of the SOC. I’ve seen RK3399 boards with more different things attached to PCIE lanes than any other arm chip on the market.

Looking into it, it looks like Khadas is using this chip now too on the vim3. That board has an M.2 slot so depending on the PCIE arrangement it could be adapted for a PCIE Mesa card possibly. I’d still rather use the N2 though, it’s built on top of a big aluminum heat sink, I’ve never even seen the thing get warm.

Sent from my iPhone