Tommy21

both, mali450 is slow, lima is not mature. disable composite would be better, and once HW cursor is enable by upstream, there will be a better performance.
 
my S905x, uses mate-desktop with metacity WM composite enabled, using mainline mesa, performance looks OK.

What mean you can't login? It does not appear on the list of available desktop environment on the display manager you are using? If yes, probably the package miss to install the "x.desktop" file, where x is the desktop environment name, that is needed to the display manager to keep track of the available desktop environment in the system. If is that the case, you can start manually the desktop environment, at least to try if it work, then i will explain how to create and place them. You have to move on a different TTY (using ctrl+alt+*a number from 0 to 9*, login, and run the appropriate launch command:
-"sway" to run sway
-"weston-launch" to run weston
-"gnome-session" to run gnome (i'm not very sure, it does not work for me)
 
Like i said i have not made strange steps to run these desktop environment, i simply installed them from apt and they worked. If you give me some more information about errors and problems you get, i will help as i can

I needed to send it complete the first time, sorry.
 

 
I've run glxinfo, same as glmark2, mali450 mesa.

Sure, there are no strange steps. I tried a lot of desktop environment installed simply from apt. The only thing that i have changed on my system is that i get packages from Debian Sid, transforming my system from stable updates to rolling release, so i get more updated packages compared to stable debian . You can switch adding some lines on apt edit-sources, but this will make your system unstable and unsecure (Sid is also called Debian Unstable) and the procedure will be, mostly, irreversible without breaking the apt system. If you can use your system without update to unstable, don't do it. I suggest before to test some of the following desktop environment , then if you want, i can guide you (it is not complicated, but it is IRREVERSIBLE, so you have to know what you are doing).
The desktop environment that i have tested:
- Weston v8.0.0-1: around 200fps, it is the wayland reference compositor, so it is the slowest. You can install directly from apt using "sudo apt install weston"
-Gnome(Wayland) v1:3.30+2: around 300-350fps. You can install directly from apt using "sudo apt install gnome-core" (gnome-core is for minimal gnome installation, for full installation of gnome and applications use "gnome"). Be sure to run this on wayland since it have also xorg version. You can check using "weston-info" command. If it gives you some infos, you are on wayland.
-Sway v1.4-2: around 500-600fps. You can install directly from apt using "sudo apt install sway". I have noticed that Debian Stable does not have Sway package, only Debian Sid have it. You can get a precompiled from debian packages (https://packages.debian.org/sid/sway) or from their git (https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/1.4).
Since differences on packages versions, sway could not be possible to install from debian package without upgrading to Sid, but you could try. Installing the package in this way should not mess up your system since dependancies are untouched: if dependancies are satisfied, apt will install it, otherwise not. Sway is a bit different from others. It is a tiling window manager, so windows behave differently from the others that are stacking window manager.
-Wayfire v0.4.0: around 600-700fps. I have compiled and installed this from the git repository (probably that the reason for that fps count, it is much optimized for my system). It is composed by 3 programs: Window Manager(wayfire),Shell (that include panel and background) (wf-shell) and Config Manager(wcm). They can be retrieved from the repository pool with all build instructions: https://github.com/WayfireWM.
You could also use wf-install that they provide. It is a script that directly download and compile the 3 component mentioned before.
If you want i can guide you to install wayfire, but i would suggest to try at least one among the other, just to see if you get better performance that xorg, the other desktop environment are simply plug and play.
 
Have fun on testing

A bug in Chromium, Lima, ...? It happened to me yesterday on K5.4 and Allwinner H5.
 
It would be strage if things would work propery when using bleeding edge software 

Version 20191228 with core 5.3 and 5.4. Proven to work on S905 and S905X.

New ver How to get HW for s905
 
https://forum.khadas.com/t/armbian-kodi-ubuntu-debian-for-sd-usb-emmc/825/305?u=balbes150

It looks like you weren't running the install script from the script's folder, but from some other directory. You must untar the tarball, cd into the created "media-script" directory, and run "./media-s905.sh"

@Tommy21 perhaps a snippet of the errors?  :-)

Well, no fancy introduction here, because this doesn't pretend to be a script for the general use, only for testers who want to try the current *very early* status of the media capabilities in the Armbian meson mainline kernel.
 
Warning: It will replace your current kernel with a pre-compiled nightly 4.19.20.
 
Instructions:
Download, untar and run. If you need further instructions, then you are not ready for this script (again, it is very unpolished, not for general use).
 
Download link: https://mega.nz/#!YvYUhayC!CI1fl52V4tV0G4oqUib4W-NlMpVSpLDp8kmo74g-V08
 
Things that you can try with this script, on a X session:
 
Use a 1080p@30fps h264 video, and play it with "mpv -hwdec <filename>". You'll see in the logs that it is decoding through v4l-m2mcopy Install and run glmark2-es2 Use Chromium WebGL Play a 1080p@30fps video in YouTube in full-screen smoothly. I'm pretty sure it is not really using HW decoding as it claims (there is no  initialization message in dmesg), but it's smooth for sure.  
Gstreamer is tested not to work, in some other forum I was told that Bionic version is not enough and I need to compile a newer one.
 
Performance is not in any way good, but it is a starting point. Anyway, the first TO-DO is getting the mali module integrated into the kernel, so there is no need to compile it separately.

Yes, actually "Desktop acceleration" means here "Desktop GPU integration". Ironically, when using the X server, that very often means that the Desktop will be slower and laggier when "accelerated". It even happens on my desktop Intel Core i7 computer . It's a fault of the terribly outdated X protocol; just imagine all Windows 10 graphic stack was running on top of the Windows 3.1 graphic system: that's something similar to what we are doing today in Linux.
 
That is precisely the reason why Wayland appeared. Now it is getting more mature, and is without any doubt the future for Linux desktop in general. And even more in embedded systems, which don't support the full OpenGL API, but only a reduced version (OpenGL for Embedded Systems), designed basically to run Android and similar OSes. On the other hand, Wayland is much more similar to the Android graphics API, which is what those SoC's are designed for.
 
So, in short: X server sucks, even more when it comes down to acceleration, and even more when you want to perform that acceleration with a device that only supports OpenGL-ES (i.e. a Mali GPU). Right now, I'm working on Amlogic X acceleration, and I'm getting more and more convinced that we need to move to Wayland if we want to get serious about accelerated desktop.

@Tommy21 No need to wait, it already works

The new version 20180928.
Major change. A new algorithm for the use of the dtb. Starting with this version, you no longer need to copy the dtb files and rename it to "dtb.img." In order to specify which dtb file to use, you need to edit the file 'uEnv.ini" (specify the desired file name for use dtb). This is a plain text file and can be easily edited. This change will make it easy to update the kernel from the "deb" file in the future. The new algorithm is now used in the eMMC system installation script.
 
Pay attention. To use the system with
u-boot-2015 (regular firmware Android), you need to edit the file "uEnv.ini"
 
When using
u-boot-2018, you need to edit the file "/extlinux/extlinux.conf"
 
 
For those who doubt or do not know what u-boot is used, you can specify the desired name in both files at the same time.

This will probably sound pretty dumb question, but why can't we use the official kernel for arm64 ?
For exemple from here : http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.9.1/
And deb packages from here : https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/arm64 
(Not for kodi, it seems that we need version 17 https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/xbmc-nightly?)

Hi there !
I'm pretty new to all this, how can we use this ? 
Is it possible to run desktop app on this ?
I found some tutorials, but I don't know if this apply :
http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/amlogic-based-tv-players/s905/tronsmart-ac/firmware-roms-tools-at/565449-running-linux-from-sd-card-or-usb-flash-drive-using-balbes150-method-and-files
 

armbianmonitor -m   if you use armbian based image. 
or 
cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp