User defined LED

The Banana Pi has a user-defined bright green LED which constantly blinks (heartbeat). Because the Banana Pi is located in my bedroom, it’s bright green LED felt somewhat annoying at night. Thus, I tried to turn the heartbeat off, with:

sudo echo "none" > /sys/class/leds/green\:ph24\:led1/trigger

Unfortunately, this did not work as described in the Banana Pi Wiki. Therefore, I had to edit the script.bin (see above). I changed the leds_trigger flag within the [leds_para] block to “mmc0”. Now, the LED indicates disc activity instead of heartbeat, similar to the Raspberry Pi’s green LED. In order to reduce it’s brightness, some black nail polish might help 😉

GPU Memory Split

In contrast to the Raspberry Pi, memory split is not configured in /boot/config.txt. The bpi-config tool isn’t ready, yet, so you have to configure it manually. To turn GPU memory sharing off on a headless system, add to the line starting with “bootargs=” in /boot/uEnv.txt:

sunxi_fb_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_no_mali_mem_reserve sunxi_g2d_mem_reserve=0 sunxi_ve_mem_reserve=0