AIO-3399J Development Board Review with Ubuntu 16.04

Regular readers will know that Firefly team sent  me several of their Rockchip boards for evaluation, and I started with a review of ROC-RK3328-CC development board powered by Rockchip RK3328 processor. This time, I went with the high-end AIO-3399J board comprised of a features-packed baseboard and a Rockchip RK3399 system-on-module.

Just like with the previous review, I’ve decided to focus on Linux support, in this case Xunbuntu 16.04, and I’ll do an Android review on the company releases Android 8.1 for Firefly-RK3399 board.

First Boot with AIO-3399J Board

Before booting the board, I inserted the heatsink, and connected the provided WiFi antennas. I also connected some devices and cables, including a mouse,  the male to male USB cable to the top USB 3.0 (OTG) port for firmware update, a HDMI cable to my TV, and Ethernet cable, as well as the serial debug board.

The final step was to connect the 12V power supply, and I immediately got output to the serial console (/dev/ttyUSB0 configured with 1,500,000 bps 8N1, no hardware flow control), and a few seconds later the Android 7.1 launcher showed up.

But I wanted to run a Linux distributions, so I went over the download page, and selected the latest Ubuntu 16.04 image (AIO-3399J_xubuntu1604_20180119.7z), which actually happens to be Xubuntu 16.04 (Ubuntu + Xfce desktop environment).  Just make sure you select “Google Drive” instead of “Official” if you are outside of China, as the download speed should be much higher that way.

Now that we have out firmware file, we just need to follow the upgrade instructions for Linux or Windows with respectively Linux_Upgrade_Tool or AndroidTool.

My computer is running Ubuntu 18.04, so I went with the Linux method. First you need to make you’ve connected your male to male USB cable between your computer and the board with power connected.

We need to enter “loader mode” as follows: keep pressing the recovery button, press and release the reset button, and about two seconds later, release the recovery button.

If everything is working as expected, the serial console output should look like:

If you have not setup the serial console, that should not be a problem, and after uncompressing the firmware, we can flash it as follows:

This normally take about a minute or so, and that’s the output from the command upon success:

The board will be automatically reboot, and Xubuntu desktop should show on your HDMI TV/monitor after a few seconds.

I then remove the male to male USB cable, and instead added a USB keyboard, and a USB 3.0 drive. You may notice I had some overscan issues (edges cut) in the photo above, but setting aspect ratio to “Just Scan” in my LG television fixed the issue.

Here’s the very first boot serial log for reference:

The kernel booted in about 20 seconds.

Some system info with the usual commands:

It’s not exactly the most recent Ubuntu version, but everything else is as expected with a 15GB rootfs, and around 1.9GB total RAM. I won’t update Ubuntu at first, in case this breaks a few things, but I’ll do it later in this review.  The board detect all four partitions on my drives, but can only mount NTFS and EXT4 partition, since exFAT and BTRFS are not enabled in the kernel.

No modules are loaded since they are built-in the kernel like with ROC-RK3328-C, and gpios appears to be enable:

Firefly has one of the best documentation for drivers and I/Os I’ve seen so far, and they explain how to define the behavior in device tree files, program the drivers in C language, and debug with sysfs.

For example, we can see more details about the pins with the following commands:

Commands to turn off and on again one of the Blue LED close to the DC jack:

Command to read ADC values using sysfs:

and some PWM info:

AIo-3399J has many I/O headers, and all marked on the other side of the board.

3D Graphics (OpenGL ES) on AIO3399-J with Ubuntu 16.04

Let’s move to test whether 3D graphics acceleration is enabled by installating the usual tools:

es2_info reports Arm Midgard  r13p0 GPU driver is indeed loaded:

es2gears works OK with Midgard driver at around 55 fps.

glmark2-es2 could also run just fine, and with more sample than on ROC-RK3328-CC since OpenGL ES 3.2 is supported (and not just version 2.0),

glmark2-es2 output:

The score is 48, which is higher than Mali-450MP platform, but still not very high. But as on other Arm platfoms, performance is greatly limited by X11 calls, and if you run the sample offscreen, the score is much higher:

Anyway, there used to be a time where most boards did not support 3D graphics acceleration, but in recent times, it appears most now do.

In the past, I’ve also found out that upgrading the OS might overwrite some files and break support for 3D graphics, so I upgraded the system to Ubuntu 16.04.5:

and both samples could still work. So all good.

I also tried WebGL, and the WebGL Quake demo worked at about 50 fps, but some other would failed complaining about missing extension.

Video Playback on AIO3399-J with Ubuntu 16.04

Hardware video decoding support is a given in Android, but not so in Linux distributions. I could not find any pre-installed video player, so I installed ffmpeg, and tried to play some 1080p videos with ffplay and it does work.

Ignore the tearing in the screenshot above, as it’s just an effect of taking a screenshot. Sadly that also means hardware video decoding is not enabled, since it would normally rely on a separate hardware buffer that does not show in screenshot (a black area is normally shown). I could play H.264, H.265, and MPEG2 1080p videos reasonably smoothly with software video decoding, except in some scenes, especially when panning when the video is not as smooth as it could be.

Since the video play relies on software video decoding it takes a fair amount of resources. I’ve also tried to play 4K H.264 / H.265 videos but unsurprinslgy the processor is not fast enough for this tasks, and the videos just play in slow motion with many audio cuts. We’ll need to wait for hardware video decoding support, or switch to Android OS.

Browsing the Web with Chromium

Browsing the web works well, pages load fast, and scrolling is about as smooth as on my main PC. However, you still have to take into account the amount of RAM, especially if you have the 2GB RAM version like I do.

For example, when I tried to play Candy Crush Saga (Facebook) in Chromium would end up with “Aw, Snap!” page meaning the current tab crashed. The kernel log explains why:

So not enough memory even if a single tab, and no other program launched. That means it’s time to enable ZRAM:

Let’s double check we now have ZRAM (swap):

and try again.

Yes! Success. The RAM is still on the limit with 512MB ZRAM, but at least I could play, and performance was very good. I could not see any difference against playing on my main PC (FX8350 program + NVIDIA GTX750 graphics card).

I would also play YouTube videos smoothly up to 720p, but 1080p video may have problems playing smoothly like in ODROID-XU4Q board.

Testing eMMC and USB 3.0 Storage Performance

I normally test storage performance with iozone (3), and installation is just one line.

The only problem is that installation would not work here. Iozone is part of multiverse repo, and it’s missing in /etc/apt/sources.list. So edit the files and add four following lines:

Now installation can be completed:

Another workaround would have been to use snaps, but there’s  configuration problem with snaps in the provided Ubuntu image:

Anyway,  we can start by testing the eMMC flash performance:

The write numbers looks normal and fairly good, but at first, I thought getting around 296MB/s read speeds on a 16GB eMMC flash is way too high.  But actually the chip is a Samsung KLMAG1JETD-B041 eMMC flash 5.1 capable of HS400 speeds, and based on data for older Samsung chips it is indeed possible to get close to 300 MB/s with a 16GB flash, at least in theory.

I switched to USB3 NTFS performance:

Write numbers look normal considering I’m using mechanical drives, and even a little low since I can normally get around 100MB/s write on that drive. However,read speed are 6 times faster than the typical performance from the drive, so let’s ignore them.

With that in mind, I’ve re-run the test on the EXT-4 partition of my drive, but this time with a 4GB file (twice the RAM):

It took  fairly long time, but at least all numbers are believable, and performance is roughly as expected, i.e. close to 100MB/s for sequential read and write operation.

This got me curious, so I repeated the eMMC flash test with a 4GB file:

But the results still look the same, so Firefly must have combined a high-end 16GB eMMC flash in their module together with proper implementation to achived those amazing read speeds. Random read values still appear to be too high though.

AIO-3399J also comes with M.2 NVMe SSD socket, which would have been interesting to test, but unfortunately I have no such SSD lying around.

Network performance – Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11ac WiFi

Gigabit Ethernet full duplex using iperf:

835 Mbps and 396 Mbps, so there’s an asymmetry while doing transfers in both direction at the same time.

But the number look better testing one direction at a time

• Upload only:

• Download only:

Gigabit Ethernet is almost maxed out in either direction.

I repeated the test for 802.11ac WiFi performance

• upload only:

• download only:

Download performance is good, but for some reasons upload could be better.

Final words

The provided Xubuntu 16.04 image works relatively well on AIO-3399J, and I’m pleased with overall performance, 3D graphics support, and good documentation for I/Os. However, hardware video decoding is not implemented, and there are few minor issues with the image such as problems with snap support, and some common apt repositories are not enabled by default. Android is probably a better option if you need 1080p or 4K video decoding.

AIO-3399J board is ideal if you need a development platform with many I/Os, and plan to use the company’s RK3399 Core-3399J system-on-module with your own custom carrier board.

AIO-3399J is sold for $165 on Firefly store with a power supply, the male to male USB cable, and two WiFi antennas. You should howevr consideing adding the heatsink to your order as well, and/or if your project requires it go with the 4GB RAM/16GB version for $235 instead. Sample price for Core-3399J SoM is respectively $95 and $119 for the 2GB and 4GB version.

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