TRS-80

I had to try 🤓

Release Planning: April 3rd. Meeting in IRC channel #armbian on freenode. Meeting starts at 2pm GMT.
(let me know if this is a bad date, because it is around easter holiday in Germany for example)
 
Code Freeze: 2021-04-19 (Monday April 19th)
Release Date: 2021-05-02 (Sunday May 2nd, estimate)
Release Candidate: <will be added on codefreeze>
Changelog: <will be added on releae>
Coordinator: @Heisath
 
The goal of this thread is to discuss testing, bugfixes, and the overall quality of the release. 
 
Open topics:
- complete desktop branch merge into master (this seems generally done, but might need fine tuning)
- enable 3D support (also done? Bugfixing)
- discuss support for desktops (IIRC it was planned to have a longer supported LTS desktop version, we need a maintainer for that, if it happens)
- check if remaining boards can / have been updated to LK5.10 (some were left out last release)
- check possible u-boot updates
- complete remaining Jira issues
- cycle and check board support status (espressobin for example needs a new maintainer (otherwise EOS) @Pali maybe?)
- late topics: 
- business meeting schedule
- kernel config changes on arm64
 
Release Planning Meeting Agenda:
 
Please add developers and more topics below, I will then also add them here.
@Myy @TonyMac32 @balbes150 @piter75 @sfx2000 @ebin-dev @chwe @ning @lanefu @gprovost @aprayoga @5kft @JMCC @martinayotte @going @jeanrhum @dolphs @jock @belfastraven @TRS-80 @Bozza @Rich Neese @sgjava @Mangix @Pali

Good!  Let them read some books, lest they never become as studious as their father! 

I don't follow the cluster stuff as much as you do lanefu (yet) but because of my recent interest in Pine64 I became aware they sell a CLUSTERBOARD with 7 slots for their SOPINE A64 COMPUTE MODULEs.  Now of course being A64 based these would be less powerful than what you are describing in OP (as well as having different form factor), however OTOH these are actual things you can buy in their store, right now.
 
Not sure how relevant PCIe lanes are to cluster computing, but I guess it depends what the work load is.  Especially if the workload is not CPU based, that could potentially be a killer feature.
 
I also cannot help but speculate it might be too niche a market to interest some mfr.  But what do I know.  A counter point, Pine64 are selling something already in this space, so... who knows?
 
EDIT: I was just watching some NicoD video and was reminded that ODROID N2+ might be even better for this.  The I/O is hobbled (shared USB) but has Gigabit Ethernet (not PoE though) but rates pretty high in his CPU/rendering type benchmarks.
 
Also, I know, it's a "dream" thread, so I hope you don't mind too much my mini review of current solutions (as a comparison, or in case anyone is looking now).  OK, back to "dreaming"... 

Here's the video.
Thank you @balbes150 for the images and @JMCCfor the media script.
Now I can start with something else

@MX10.AC2N I think you are approaching your issue from the wrong perspective.  As balbes already mentioned he "doesn't use this software and has no idea what it requires'.  So essentially asking the same question in a different way isn't likely to get a different answer.
 
You need to understand that the armbian project is about getting the mainline linux (debian and ubuntu distributions) to run on arm SBCs (and luckily that often works on TV boes as well).  Information and support of the thousands of software programs that can then run on debian or ubuntu isn't something that armbian is about.
 
NextCloud is a software product and you want to run that program on your armbian based TV box, which is great, but you should be looking for support from the NextCloud community for support of their product.
 
You mention in your posts NextCloudPI.  I'm not sure why you are going down that particular path.  You should be able to just install NextCloud following their instructions for your chosen distribution (debian or ubuntu).  I have been running nextcloud on one of my amlogic s905w based TX3 mini boxes for over a year using the snap version for my ubuntu bionic install.  It was easy to install, it automatically updates itself and I haven't had to think about it in a long time.  That is exactly what you want from a server based software program.  Now if you ask me what i did over a year ago to get it installed, I will have no recollection, but I just followed the readily available instructions available from nextcloud to get it done - didn't need to post anything to armbian forums to install a generic software product.

I moved the above to a separate thread as the content is distinct from the thread it was originally posted in.

I'd like to buy one or more NanoPi NEO2 or NanoPi NEO2 BLACK. Preferably 1GB model.
 
The manufacturer stopped selling these boards and none of the currrent models fit in their CNC OLED case (which I would also be interested in but will otherwise buy from them).
 
(Actually, anything with 64-bit CPU that fits in that case, or similarly nano-size with display and buttons, is of interest)
 
Will pay shipping to Asia from wherever you are.

Hi,
 
sorry for the late reply. Current state @Technicavolous : Hijax and I are pretty busy at the moment so project is progressing rather slow, but:
Hijax is done with the final (?) revision of the power&serial mux board. You can check it out here: https://github.com/armbian/mpads/tree/serial-mux-updated
Also we are working on the SD card muxing which is surprisingly hard: https://github.com/armbian/mpads/tree/sd-card-mux-redesign 
On the master branch I am working on the firmware for SD card muxer: https://github.com/armbian/mpads/tree/master (warning, the kicad files there are outdated. We should merge the branches).
 
Current state of the software/hardware combo is something like:
- Power/Serial working and controllable via i2c with a small script.
- sd card can be selected via I2C and gets accessible to the host with STM32 
- sd card can be attached to the slave. 
 
Main problem is stability and powering of the sdcards (related). Also there are some issues with the usb/mass storage driver in the STM32 but it is somewhat working. 
 
 

I get a message that I don't have permission to read that thread ... :[
Still interested in this, I'm much stronger in hardware.

I've taken peeks at threads related to hardware decoding (of H.264 and HEVC, mainly) on Allwinner and Rockchip platforms on and off, sometimes dabbled in trying and failing to implement solutions recommended there. Being a complete amateur, I find the topic very opaque and confusing, with various different components that need to interface with each other, be patched in sync, and sometimes change drastically between kernel versions, etc. Today I sat down and read up on these subjects, scouring wikis, documentation, this forum, and assorted other sources to try and understand how this works. In this post I will attempt to compile what I've learned on the different software components involved, their relationships, their current status, and solutions to the problem. I hope people more knowledgeable will correct me when I get something wrong or cite outdated information. Stuff which I am highly uncertain of I will print in italics.
(This post is going to focus on mainline implementations of Cedrus/Allwinner, I haven't looked into Hantro/Rkvdec/Rockchip specifics yet. I will speak only of H.264 and H.265/HEVC; I don't understand the high/low stuff and didn't pay attention to other codecs.)
 
Components:
 
Basics: Video codecs like H.264, H.265/HEVC, MPEG-2, etc. are standardised methods which serve to more efficiently encode and decode videos, reducing their filesize. Software en-/decoding is very CPU-intensive. Modern GPUS and ARM SoCs therefore contain specialised hardware (VPUs) to delegate these tasks to. Working hardware decoding is particularly important for underpowered ARM CPUs.
Drivers: Topmost in the stack are the VPU drivers. These are Sunxi-Cedrus/Cedrus V4L2 M2M and Cedar [Is this the legacy one?] on Allwinner; Hantro and Rkvdec on Rockchip. These are all still in development, but Cedrus already fully supports H.264, and partially supports HEVC, and is already usable in the mainline kernel.
APIs: In order for anything (userspace APIs, libraries) to make use of the VPU drivers, you need backends/APIs. For Cedrus, there is the unmaintained libva-v4l2-request backend which implements VA-API, the legacy VDPAU implementation libvdpau-sunxi, and as of kernel version 5.11, H.264 has been merged into the uAPI headers. Different applications may make recourse to one or another of these APIs.
Libraries: FFmpeg and GStreamer. provide libraries and APIs of their own to other applications but can (importantly!) also output directly to the framebuffer. FFmpeg must be patched to access either libva-v4l2-request or the Cedrus driver headers. GStreamer directly accesses kernel headers since 1.18 (works on 5.9, not on 5.10; 1.20 will support 5.11.)
Media players: mpv and depends on FFmpeg for hardware acceleration (and must be patched together with it). VLC can be set to access libva-v4l2-request directly. Kodi 19.0+ supports hardware acceleration out of the box without any out-of-tree patches.
Display server: An additional complication is drawing the output of any of the above on screen. Most successful implementations I've seen bypass X11 and either output directly to the framebuffer or force a plane/display layer on top of any X windows. Wayland apparently makes this easier by allowing applications to use their own DRM planes, but this hasn't been explored much yet. Kodi 19.0 works with all three windowing systems (X, Wayland, and gbm).
 
Codec status:
 
Taken from the LibreElec thread (which reflects LibreElec's status and is ahead of what works elsewhere, but outlines hardware limitations):
 
 
Approaches:
 
Many people have managed to make it work on their machines using different approaches. Note that some of these solutions are one or two years old, and kernel developments since may have changed the situation. Ordered from newer to older:
 
LibreElec – kernel + ffmpeg + Kodi: LibreElec is a Just-Enough-OS with the sole purpose of running Kodi, a media player. It's at the bleeding edge and usually implements codecs and features well before mainline or other distros. It achieves this by heavily patching everything up and down the stack, from the Linux kernel over FFmpeg to Kodi itself. These patches could all be applied to an Armbian build, but there are a lot of them, they're poorly documented, and you'd need to dig into their github to understand what they all do. LibreElec runs Kodi directly without a desktop. kodi-gbm is a package that can be installed on Armbian and functions similarly.
Key contributors to the project are @jernej and @Kwiboo, who sometimes post about their work here (and have been very helpful with questions, thank you). @balbes150 includes some of LibreElec's patches in his Armbian-TV builds, but I don't know which.
 
Kodi 19.0: 
 
LibreElec patches + mpv:
 
 
@megous – Kernel 5.11 + GStreamer: This implementation, done here on a PinePhone (A64), patches the 5.9 kernel and uses a recent version of GStreamer (1.18 and up), whose output is rendered directly to a DRM plane via kmssink. (No X or Wayland.)
GStreamer 1.18 works with the 5.9 kernel. It does not work with 5.10, because of numerous changes to the kernel headers in this version. In 5.11 the H.264 headers were moved into the uAPI; the master branch of GStreamer reflects this, but there haven't been any releases with these patches yet. It'll probably be in repositories with GStreamer 1.20; until then you can build it from source.
 
@Sash0k – patched libva-v4l2-request + VLC: This updates bootlin's libva-v4l2-request and follows the Sunxi wiki's instructions for enabling VLC to make use of it. It works on the desktop. This only works for H.264 and breaks HEVC. When I tried to replicate this approach on a recent Armbian build, I discovered that the h264.c files in the kernel (that libva-v4l2-request draws on) have changed considerably between 5.8 and 5.10, and I lack the understanding to reconcile libva-v4l2-request with them.
 
@ubobrov – old kernel + libcedrus + libvdpau-sunxi + ffmpeg + mpv: This approach, which supports encoding decoding of H.264 uses the libvdpau-sunxi API and ports the legacy driver to mainline as a loadable kernel module and if I understand it correctly, ubobrov ported a legacy feature to mainline. In the post quoted below the kernel is 4.20, but the same method has been successfully applied to 5.7.8 by another user. It requires that the board's device tree be patched, as documented in ubobrov's github repository.
 
 
The summary seems to be that none of the current implementations on Allwinner boards really play nice with X or desktop sessions, and it's best to output directly to the framebuffer. Kwiboo has forked FFmpeg and mpv to make good use of new and unstable kernel features/hardware acceleration which will take a while to make their way upstream. The recent 5.11 move of stateless H.264 out of staging and into the uAPI should facilitate further developments.
I intend to try some of these things in the nearer future. Thanks to everyone who works on mainlining all of this VPU stuff, and to users here who contribute solutions and readily & patiently answer questions (Jernej especially). I hope I didn't post any falsehoods out of ignorance, and welcome any corrections.
 
Other related threads here:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/11551-4kp30-video-on-orange-pi-lite-and-mainline-hardware-acceleration/
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16804-orange-pi-pc-h3-armbian-focal-5104-sunxi-av-tv-out-cvbs-enable/page/2/
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/11184-hardware-graphicvideo-acceleration-in-h3-mainline/
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/13622-mainline-vpu/

I realize you are probably joking, but look here. 

From little I know about Ansible, it seems like it may perhaps even be "the right" tool(?).
 
However, languages / frameworks that current (and likely future) maintainers already know and are comfortable with, IMO, should also be an important consideration.  Perhaps even more important?  I kind of lean this way, but... how willing are people to learn new tool and switch to it?  Especially if that would reduce work / maintenance burden in the long run (which I suspect is true, but do not even know for sure, maybe @lanefu can elaborate here as he seems to be the one with most experience with it)?
 
Just $0.02 from someone who fancies themselves a bit of a strategic thinker and student of computer / tech history.
 
EDIT:  This may seem like a "small" decision, but I don't think it should be rushed.  "Complete re-writes" in different language / framework have been known to kill entire projects (some with much. much more resources behind them than we have).  Therefore the benefits should be clear and real, and not simply based on personal preferences.

Have they released Office/Windows under F/LOSS license?  Tells you everything you need to know.  Leopard don't change their spots, which is why I am not buying that they suddenly "got religion" about open source.
 
Remember, they tried (very hard!) for decades to kill F/LOSS!  Referring to it as "cancer", etc.  Back then, the future was not certain, I can assure you!  By now, things look a lot better, it appears we won and they lost!  We are not only still here, but growing, which is why they had to switch tactic/marketing, or else become irrelevant.  But that is all it is, marketing (i.e., lies, as their actions prove otherwise, see first point).
 
So let them die off already, IMO.  By virtue of their past actions, they no longer deserve to be a part of the collaborative future we are building together.  Make no mistake, they are still the enemy.  And the enemy deserves neither aid nor comfort from us.
 
If you are going to disregard all the above and put it in anyway, then yes, Vscodium would be a more palatable alternative (removing the spyware).  But still misses the (IMO) more important political point.  Not to mention the fact that such a fork is necessary only serves to reinforce my earlier points that M$ still does not really "get it."  Even when trying to do "open source" they still cannot help themselves but put spyware into it, have a EULA, and all the other nonsense we have always expected from them.

IMHO I would not ship zsh by default. Simply because one of Armbians goals is to provide a mostly unmodified experience known from a fresh vanilla Debian/Ubuntu installation on other platforms. Providing as pre-configured and easy to install enhancement is perfectly fine.

LOL No, man, I'm not that old!

I am very impressed by how much feature we are getting... WOWIE
I don't know if anyone has said this to you but you are a legend!

Commercial Rpi OS is based on: https://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Page which is IMO not near more modern and project they have forked, seems dead. But it certainly appears more modern than its fork ... perhaps more than XFCE. Subjective.
 
Our current amateur desktop is more or less stock XFCE with custom theme and wallpaper and was not changed since years - except internal version, applications within. We only make it to provide something clean, light and stable. It has those most important properties, which is important for serious deployments. Distro hoppers or Rpi users are not our target group and on most hardware we support, Armbian is usually best choice for different reasons.
 
But as @Werner pointed out, for about a year we are developing desktop upgrade - but its again for our internal needs, to make more desktop options and to make package management easier. We hope someone will step up and tweak desktops further so they will look nicer but if not, they will remain as is.
 
If you want to trade stability and security for nice design, just say it  It is way way cheaper to make desktop looks nice then keeping OS functional. We can't cover everything and in any case - there is no reward except internal satisfaction.

As a fun little hack, here's a little example wrapper for the dialog program. Mark it executable, toss it in /usr/local/bin, and fire up armbian-config.
 
Obviously delete it afterwards. don't leave it there. That's probably a bad idea.
 
But might work as a brief tech demo of what an X11 driven armbian-config might look like ...
 

dialog

Your MicroServer has either an Opteron or Ryzen processor in it, either one of which is considerably more powerful than the Arm-based RK3399.
 
As a quick test, I ran OpenSSL benchmarks for AES-256-CBC on my Ryzen 2700X desktop, an older N54L MicroServer, and the Helios64, block size 8129 bytes.
 
Helios64: 68411.39kB/s.
N54L: 127620.44kB/s.
Desktop: 211711.31kB/s.
 
From that, you can see the Helios64 CPU is your bottleneck: 68,411.39kB/s is about 67MB/s, or within shouting distance of your 62MB/s real-world throughput - and that's just encryption, without the LZ4 compression overhead.
 

Moved post into its own thread as this is not related to the thread it was originally posted in.

Wherein I explain my conversion... 
 
Pine64 was barely on my radar in the past.  There are so many SBC and companies just trying to sell crap it can be hard to tell who is who some times, until you look into one company / board / device or another, a little more in depth.
 
I have been following Librem 5 development for a long time, so I was aware of PinePhone, but they seemed in my mind back then a bit like a "Johnny come lately" who were just trying to capitalize on whatever Purism were trying to do.
 
Then @lanefu was raving about his PineBookPro in IRC, it was only then I started really poking around their forums the last month or so, and now I must say my opinion of them have really changed a lot.
 
Now they seem to me like a really hacker mindset, hardware oriented company.  They really seem to just enjoy making and selling interesting/compelling hardware (for cheap! to get the stuff out there).  They sell spare parts for example, and have a wiki with lots of good information, and schematics, etc.  And they have a nice community forming around their devices, who are in turn, creating spin-off projects...  In short, they seem to be the genuine article (in a time where many other companies are riding on the wave of popularity of "open source" whilst in actuality being nothing of the sort).
 
Purism seem more committed to pushing the supply chain in a F/LOSS direction, but how can we know that Pine64 are not (without being mind readers)?  Well, I have always realized Pine64 are simply taking a different approach.  Some times I fear Purism may have bit off more than they can chew.  They are shipping now, but only in low numbers.  r/Purism is a cesspool of nasty, disgruntled people (maybe I expect too much, it is Reddit, after all).  But if Purism fail, I fear that will set back GNU/Linux on phones overall.  Which is the only thing I really care about.  At any rate, even if I were to order one now, it seems I would be waiting at least a year, also with a less than nil chance of never receiving the device at all, unfortunately.
 
The Pine64 approach, whilst admittedly not as appealing to my inner rms zealot , is perhaps more realistic and attainable.  The older I get, and more real world project / life experience, I start to wonder if this may be the better approach.  Smaller steps, and iteration.  Who knows where it will lead, if we can get more numbers of Linux phones actually in the hands of more people.  For example, apparently some guy already reverse engineered the PinePhone modem OS, and has it running with plain Linux, without blobs!  Amazing!
 
At some point I guess I realized that PinePhone and Librem 5 are not competing with one another, and that none of this is an either/or proposition.  In fact, both projects are advancing the state of the art of GNU/Linux phones; just in different ways.
 
Very recently, I was trying to upgrade to the latest LineageOS on my Galaxy s5.  Of course this is a pain in the arse and why I only get around to really doing it every year or two it seems.  And every time, it seems Google / carriers / whoever have tightened the noose a little bit more.  So, this time around, I finally reached the point where I became so disgusted, that I was willing to actually cancel my cellular service altogether, rather than continue dealing with this nonsense (specifically: VoLTE is becoming mandatory on US carriers, and LineageOS have said they cannot / will not support VoLTE for whatever reason).
 
Importantly, I think it's important to point out that I think any human being needs to reach some tipping point, where our disgust for ${current platform} exceeds the hassle and/or learning curve of switching to ${new platform}.  I have said this many times to people who are curious about switching from Windows -> Linux for example.  Also, this point varies for different people (I get there sooner as I care more about Freedom and have less patience for dinosaur sociopathic proprietary business models, etc.).
 
Anyway, reading some recent threads/posts at Pine64 forums revealed that the PinePhone is currently actually apparently quite usable as a "daily driver" at least for the bare minimum of things I would say that entails: phone/voice (including VoLTE(!)), SMS, and data (on most carriers in US, anyway[0]).  Which was honestly better than I was expecting.  Of course, there are many, many programs in the repositories that do not work properly (or at all) on a phone interface.  And what any individual will consider "bare minimum" acceptable will vary greatly!  But for me at least, that basic phone/data/SMS functionality is enough.  All the rest will not only come in time, if I have a PinePhone in hand I will be able to actively contribute to making it happen, sooner.
 
So, yeah, I pulled the trigger on a PinePhone.      And I plan to use it (more or less) as my "daily driver", likely with my old s5 along side for some period of time, just in case (I figure I should be able to tether it if needed, as tethering is also already working on PinePhone).
 
Long term, I think we still need to continue to push the supply chain in a more explicitly F/LOSS/H direction.  Therefore (assuming they don't go bankrupt before then) I will likely also purchase one or more Librem devices from Purism in the future to support that goal.
 
But buying a PinePhone now gets me in the game, sooner.  And I really started to like what they have going on over there.
 
Please discuss.
 
Cheers,
TRS-80
 
[0] some times requiring workarounds

Have they released Office/Windows under F/LOSS license?  Tells you everything you need to know.  Leopard don't change their spots, which is why I am not buying that they suddenly "got religion" about open source.
 
Remember, they tried (very hard!) for decades to kill F/LOSS!  Referring to it as "cancer", etc.  Back then, the future was not certain, I can assure you!  By now, things look a lot better, it appears we won and they lost!  We are not only still here, but growing, which is why they had to switch tactic/marketing, or else become irrelevant.  But that is all it is, marketing (i.e., lies, as their actions prove otherwise, see first point).
 
So let them die off already, IMO.  By virtue of their past actions, they no longer deserve to be a part of the collaborative future we are building together.  Make no mistake, they are still the enemy.  And the enemy deserves neither aid nor comfort from us.
 
If you are going to disregard all the above and put it in anyway, then yes, Vscodium would be a more palatable alternative (removing the spyware).  But still misses the (IMO) more important political point.  Not to mention the fact that such a fork is necessary only serves to reinforce my earlier points that M$ still does not really "get it."  Even when trying to do "open source" they still cannot help themselves but put spyware into it, have a EULA, and all the other nonsense we have always expected from them.

Thanks for the warning but after running between 20 and 30 TOR nodes for about 4 years already, I have seen most problems comming up with this. 
But you are right in the point, not to run an exitnode from your own home network.
In this case a middlenode is a good choise and make no problems at all. 
Exits are better placed in a DC.
In Europe some good and cheap options are avaliable for this and own dedicated hardware via a SBC is a good way to go in safe environment.
 
I found the NanoPi Neo3 to be a good choise for this use case. But it’s just ramping up the traffic now. Will take some days to have results that count.
 

@TRS-80 - I  do use i 5 port card now, works out of the box, and very cheap.. any ways.

If i remember correct, i did something like this:
 
cd /etc/udev/rules.d sudo nano 99-9230.rules in the file add this line
 
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x1b4b", ATTR{device}=="0x9230", RUN+="/bin/bash -c 'echo %k > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ahci/bind'" reboot, and the card should be visible, in OMV

Hi, i have inserted link from a older thread, where we talked about rockpro64 as a NAS