Upcoming Debian April release for DB410c-- call for testing

Update:

Yesterday I took the 5/04 developer build and stripped out the bloat (which was minimal, pulseaudio, network-manager, alsa, avahi, blah) and added the stretch sources, while keeping the linaro sources. updated; upgraded; purged; upgraded; purged; solved dependency issues; rebooted - in a cycle for about 20 minutes and ended up with a nice stable stretch build with both wifi & bluetooth running nicely, other than that pesky 272 bug. I even updated with the most recent boot-loader again for good measure.

Then I added LXDE, alsa, pulseaudio, etc.

With NetworkManager stopped all is stable and I was able to install a bunch of audio / visual packages and start broadcasting both audio wireless throughout the house (working on video).

Of course I am not using anything other than USB wireless keyboard mouse, bluetooth speaker, pulseaudio-dlna, HDMI, so I am not exactly sure what I broke from the standard build by quasi-upgrading to stretch.

I noticed that the wifi starts to degrade (ping times go from ~1ms to sporadic ~30ms to 50ms) once the CPUs are pegged at 50%+ and RAM is pegged at ~90%, which I guess would be expected. I’m sure there is some tuning that could be done, which is admittedly beyond my capabilities. 272 remains the biggest issue.

Hi @noah,

Thank you for your great update report.
:slight_smile:

Any thoughts on when bug #272 will be patched in a official release? I see a 5/11 build released. Is it patched there?

I’m running 4.48 kernel with Stretch + linaro distros and the board is mostly stable. I’ve managed to corrupt the OS a couple of times by installing debootstraps and ended up without NetworkManager altogether.

I’m ready to help if I can…

hi, we are looking at 272, not sure yet, when it will be done. an initial patch was shard on the list:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg377402.html

but this is just a first attempt, not the final solution yet.

To follow up on the Apr 29 post by @ljking, I’ve finally upgraded to the 16.04 release so I could test it. This release does not include the SPI patches required for transfers >16 bytes, but the patches described in the previous spi thread still work, so there’s no major issue there:
http://www.96boards.org/forums/topic/how-to-enable-spi-and-access-it-in-debian-os/

I had to make the same changes ljking made to the dtsi files described on Apr 29, as well as apply the patches mentioned earlier to support my 32kB SPI transfers, and afterward everything is working fine. With the 16.02 release the CPU would lock up hard after about an hour of processing, and with 16.04 I’m at about 3 hours and counting with no issues. So far so good.

The original device I built a few months ago is still doing long term testing with the 15.12 release, but earlier this week I built two more devices, one of which is now doing long term testing on the 16.04 release, so in a week or two I’ll know how stable it is relative to 15.12.

One thing I’ve been noticing with the 15.12 release is I’ll get an occasional half-second CPU hiccup once or twice per day. It’s not too severe, and the hardware buffering I have on my device is enough to ride through it, but I wonder if this is related to the cpufreq issue that’s been resolved in this release. It’ll be interesting to see if that clears up now.

6 posts were split to a new topic: Problems with python-upm: Cannot import upm