Cubieboard 1: High load, fixing the MAC address, and RAM

[sachilles]

Hi there,

I'm planning to change the OS used on my Cubieboard 1. Therefore I prepared an micro SD card based on the instructions given in http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/allwinner/cubieboard#qt-platform_tabs-ui-tabs2.

Everything seems to be fine; the system is working. Nevertheless, I faced some problems:

1.) Is it possible to set up an fixed MAC address? Usually I added for instance

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
[dynamic]
MAC = "0123456789AB"
')

to script.fex file, compiled it to get the script.bin and replaced this with the one given by the image (see also https://linux-sunxi.org/Manual_build_howto#Building_script.bin). In understood that by using the mainline kernel this won't work. But I couldn't figure out how to fix the MAC address using the current release of archlinux.

2.) By using the image without fixing the MAC address I realised a load > 1 (just check top or htop). I know this behaviour from CUBIAN (which is my currently installed linux distribution). To overcome this problem in https://github.com/cubieplayer/Cubian/issues/183 it was figured out to either deactivate the SUNXI USB 2.0 driver in the Kernel or to disable the OTG port in the script.fex (and therfore in the script.bin) file. Is there a similar way using archlinux?

3.) By checking the available RAM I found that the image supports something like 950 MB, while using after boot about 40 MB. This is fine, but is there a reason for using about 500 MB for buffers and cache?

Thanks in advance.

[sachilles]

Hi,

after installing the latest updates the points 2.) and 3.) of my initial post are solved (by magic). The first point was a bit more harder to solve.

I tried to apply some parameters to the kernel module sun4i_emac. This wasn't fruitful and thus I just spoof my own MAC address (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MAC_address_spoofing#iproute2). After installing (enabling and activating) the corresponding service everything is fine. This is probably not the best solution, but it works. If someone has a better idea then please let me know.

Best regards