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November 5, 2023April 30, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 43 Comments

Raspberry Pi 5 review – Part 2: Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, benchmarks, power consumption, and more

Raspberry Pi 5 Review Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm

A few days ago I finally went through the Raspberry Pi 5 kit I received last September going through all the items and booting it with Raspberry Pi OS bookworm. I’ve now had time to perform more tests to check out the performance with benchmarks and test various features on the Raspberry Pi 5. So I’ll report my experience in the second part of the review and compare the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC to the Raspberry Pi 4 and some other Arm Linux SBCs.

System information in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm

Last time around, I installed the Raspberry Pi 5 in its official case, but for most of the testing, I decided to go back to the bare board fitted with its active cooler since it’s the best cooling option as we’ll see further in the review.

June 21, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Checking Out Raspberry Pi OS 64-Bit on Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM

The Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM launched a couple of weeks ago together with the beta version of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit. Note that you should currently use the 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (previously known as Raspbian) as the 64-bit still has bugs and missing features, but I want to find out the current progress, so I installed raspios_arm64-2020-05-28/2020-05-27-raspios-buster-arm64.zip and had no problem to boot the board. Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit System Information After going through the setup wizard in the desktop environment to configure the language, time, networking, etc…, and make sure the OS is updated, I checkout some information:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
BogoMIPS	: 108.00
Features	: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd08
CPU revision	: 3
...
Hardware	: BCM2835
Revision	: d03114
Serial		: 10000000694c8ae2
Model		: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0

BogoMIPS : 108.00

Features : fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid

CPU implementer : 0x41

CPU architecture: 8

CPU variant : 0x0

CPU part : 0xd08

CPU revision : 3

...

Hardware : BCM2835

Revision : d03114

Serial : 10000000694c8ae2

Model : Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4

I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4 with 8GB Memory (revision: d03114), the image comes with a 64-bit Linux kernel:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 5.4.42-v8+ #1319 SMP PREEMPT Wed May 20 14:18:56 BST 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

1 2	pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a Linux raspberrypi 5.4.42-v8+ #1319 SMP PREEMPT Wed May 20 14:18:56 BST 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

and we do get a 64-bit rootfs.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ file /bin/busybox 
/bin/busybox: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, ARM aarch64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1, for GNU/Linux 3.7.0, BuildID[sha1]=fdf7b3dd496e8fd678a0bda5540f9fae4d313d8f, stripped

1 2	pi@raspberrypi:~ $ file /bin/busybox /bin/busybox: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, ARM aarch64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1, for GNU/Linux 3.7.0, BuildID[sha1]=fdf7b3dd496e8fd678a0bda5540f9fae4d313d8f, stripped

All good. Known issues Before starting the review, let’s make ourselves aware […]

December 7, 2019June 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

AI inference using Images, RTSP Video Stream on NVIDIA Jetson Nano Devkit

Last month I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit together with 52Pi ICE Tower Cooling Fan, and the main goal was to compare the performance of the board with the stock heatsink or 52Pi heatsink + fan combo. But the stock heatsink does a very good job of cooling the board, and typical CPU stress tests do not make the processor throttle at all. So I had to stress the GPU as well, as it takes some efforts to set it up all, so I’ll report my experience configuring the board, and running AI test programs including running objects detection on an RTSP video stream. Setting up NVIDIA Jetson Nano Board Preparing the board is very much like you’d do with other SBC’s such as the Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA has a nicely put getting started guide, so I won’t go into too many details here. To summarize: Download the […]

July 24, 2019July 28, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Chuwi HiPAD LTE Tablet Review – Part 2: Android 8.0

Last month, I received HiPad LTE tablet, and in the first part of the review I checked out the specifications of the 10″ tablet with a MediaTek Helio X27 deca-core processor, 3GB RAM, 32 GB storage, and had a look at the accessories including the keyboard dock. I’ve now had more time to actually play with the device, so I’ll report my experience with Android 8.0, and the pros and cons of the latest Chuwi tablet. General Impressions My previous tablet was Onda V18 Pro, and Chuwi HiPad LTE is clearly an upgrade thanks to the faster Heliox X27 deca-core processor coupled with 3GB of RAM. The 10.1″ display has a 1920×1200 resolution, not quite as good as the 2560×1600 resolution of the Onda tablet, but I still found the screen to be crispy and sharp. I found the tablet to be great for browsing the web and watching YouTube […]

July 14, 2019August 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

ODROID-H2 Review – Part 2: Ubuntu 19.04

After many months of delays due to Intel not mass-producing Gemini Lake processors, Hardkernel started selling ODROID-H2 again, more exactly ODROID-H2 Rev. B, and the end of last month, and the company sent me a full kit for evaluation. You can check out ODROID-H Rev. B with Type 3 case and the assembly instructions in the first part of the review. I’ve now had time to play with the board using the pre-installed Ubuntu 19.04 operating systems so I’ll report my experience in this second part. Note that ODROID-H2 does not rely on a custom version of Ubuntu, and instead you can download and flash Ubuntu 18.04 or 19.04 ISO directly from Ubuntu website. First Boot and System Information I had already connected two SATA drives inside the enclosure, one SSD and one HDD, but before booting the device I connected an HDMI cable, one Ethernet cable, USB keyboard & […]

March 13, 2019April 13, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

FOSSASIA 2019 Schedule – March 14-17

As its name implies, FOSSASIA is a Free and Open Source Software event taking place every year in Asia, more specifically in Singapore. I first discovered it last year, and published a virtual FOSSASIA 2018 schedule last year to give an idea about the subjects discussed at the event. It turns out FOSSASIA 2019 is coming really soon, as in tomorrow, so I’m a bit late, but I’ll still had a look at the schedule and made my own for the 4-day event. Thursday – March 14, 2019 10:05 – 10:25 – For Your Eyes Only: Betrusted & the Case for Trusted I/O by Bunnie Huang, CTO Chibitronics Security vulnerabilities are almost a fact of life. This is why system vendors are increasingly relying on physically separate chips to handle sensitive data. Unfortunately, private keys are not the same as your private matters. Exploits on your local device still have […]

October 2, 2018October 2, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Dav1d Open Source AV1 Decoder Aims to be Fast and Lightweight

Lots of efforts are being put into AV1 open source, royalty-free video codec with the AV1 specification published in March, and companies like YouTube and Netflix having recently uploaded AV1 video samples for testing and evaluation. We also reported FFmpeg 4.0 was released with AV1 supporting using libaom reference decoder. However, the library is not really optimized for code size and speed, but instead just to demonstrate AV1 decoding and encoding. So VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have been working on another decoder called Dav1d – which stands for “Dav1d is an AV1 Decoder” – that aims to be lightweight, cross-platform, fast and open source. Some of the technical details about dAV1d include: written in C99 without VLAs (Variable Length Arrays) ASM in NASM/GAS syntax (no intrinsics), Meson/ninja buildsystem, Works on x86, x64, ARMv7, ARMv8 architectures for now Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS operating systems Licensed under BSD […]

April 15, 2018April 16, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

How to Install and Use Ace Stream Easily in Ubuntu / Mint Linux

Ace Stream enabling the streaming of videos using P2P (peer-to-peer) technology – specifically BitTorrent protocol – and is especially useful for live streams, but also works for Audio and Video on Demand, and IOTT (Interactive-Over-The-Top). Ace Stream is implemented in a fork of VLC (Ace Player HD) working in Windows, Linux and Android, and I’ve found Full HD quality to be higher than services like YouTube, and with less buffering provided enough users watches the stream. It’s easy to use in Windows, and there used to be an Android app installable from the Play Store but it’s been removed, possibly because of the association of the solution with piracy. But just like Kodi, it’s up to do what you want to use it for. Using Ace Player was easy in Ubuntu up to version 14.04 thanks to a ppa, but with Ubuntu 16.04 it become a little more complicated as you […]