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comparing armbian versus archlinuxarm on odroid c2


harrybarnes

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I have recently installed armbian on odroid c2. -The burning the armbian image using etcher.io was surprisingly easy and agreeable

-gui bringup with a default desktop was agreeable too. ovo.fyi/lorem-ipsumovo.fyi/emp-mailovo.fyi/10-minute-mail

-the kernel version is more recent 4.14+

-the support for mali gpu seemed to announced on this version BUT the responsiveness from the web browser, the responsiveness from the media players was choppy.

When I installed the archlinux again:

-followed the archlinuxarm.org wiki steps for odroid c2. Sure it wasn't like etcher two step download and burn, but the number of steps was reasonable, under twenty roughly. -the bootup was faster -the gui desktop setup took a few more commands: pacman -S xorg-drivers xorg-apps xorg lxde-gtk3 emacs firefox -the kernel is older 3.14.79, but is responsive and the firefox is responsive along with the media player.

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The people of Armbian are doing as much as they can to get the images easy to use and with an as good experience as possible.
But when it comes to hardware accelerated video this is very hard since for every SoC/board this is different. This is possible on some boards, but a lot needs to be done to get this on every board.
When it comes to an Odroid there are good alternatives provided by Hardkernel themself. So I don't see it a high priority for this board. But it would be great to have.

ARM SBC's are development boards. The software for it is largely made for and by the community.
For many boards there is no other well working image to be found except for Armbian. So it is awesome we have Armbian.

I hope things will improve for HW acc video. These boards are getting more and more powerfull, and can give a good desktop experience. For that good video playback is essential.
For the NanoPi M4 there's a media script that works great. But with other boards with the same SoC it doesn't work correctly. So that shows what kind of problems there are to get these things working.

Enjoy your C2, it's a great SBC. One of my favorites.

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16 hours ago, harrybarnes said:

the kernel is older 3.14.79


Old kernel has build-in support for various acceleration, but:

- its old, overall low quality, support is long gone and could be/it is security problematic out of the box,

- 3D & video is (usually) closed source and can't be reused on modern kernel. Things must be written from scratch and this task(project) is measured in years and is related to thousands of R&D hours which usually nobody pays for,

- accelerations are tied to old fixed versions of Chromium (you can't update it) which represent yet another security risk,

 

We are focused towards open source, modern kernels (security and stability) and CLI usage. Video/desktop acceleration comes last in play.

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On 4/4/2019 at 1:55 PM, harrybarnes said:

I have recently installed armbian on odroid c2. -The burning the armbian image using etcher.io was surprisingly easy and agreeable

-gui bringup with a default desktop was agreeable too.

-the kernel version is more recent 4.14+

-the support for mali gpu seemed to announced on this version BUT the responsiveness from the web browser, the responsiveness from the media players was choppy.

When I installed the archlinux again:

-followed the archlinuxarm.org wiki steps for odroid c2. Sure it wasn't like etcher two step download and burn, but the number of steps was reasonable, under twenty roughly. -the bootup was faster -the gui desktop setup took a few more commands: pacman -S xorg-drivers xorg-apps xorg lxde-gtk3 emacs firefox -the kernel is older 3.14.79, but is responsive and the firefox is responsive along with the media player.

I am a little bit skeptical of such comparisons.

First, you don't say which flavor of armbian you have tested. Ambian Ubuntu or Armbian Debian? and which Ubuntu/Debian release? What desktop was used (Gnome, KDE, Mate, Xfce?)? You do realize that Armbian is a work that combines well-known distributions with unsupported hardware and does the amazing job of integrating these into a very easily installed (as you noticed) and useful OS?

Also, if you just scratch the surface of kernel development you'll realize how problematic outdated vendor kernels are compared to mainline. But then again, you should use whatever suits you best, and if that means using Arch Linux ARM with an outdated kernel, so be it.

By the way you can use Armbian's kernels with Arch Linux ARM too, it's just a matter of installing them.

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