Orange pi 4

[rajprakash]

I may have missed it, but do the Orange Pi 4 USB3 ports share bandwidth behind an internal hub? Or are they completely separate, similar to previous Orange Pi boards?  In other words, the Orange Pi 4 has a pair of USB3 ports.  Are those two ports independent and can both independently run up to the 5Gbps (real world maybe 3Gbps) theoretical speed?  

[Misho]

Hello guys,

 

Please I want to ask you who already own the Opi 4 a few questions

 

1) Can you please test screen tearing? In desktop Armbian (Which desktop?)

2) What about GPU drivers in Armbian? So youtube and etc, is encoded via CPU? But running well in 720/1080p 60fps?

 

THANKS

 

Because I bought rpi4, and i am dissappointed... I have tried many linux OS´s , different settings, drivers, etc, but in every desktop OS i see screen tearing in 1080p 60Hz. I don´t think I want too much, i only need smooth scroll and smooth desktop experience...

 

[Igor]

50 minutes ago, Misho said:

but in every desktop OS

Hardware interface, kernel and special hw dependent libraries, the expensive thing is responsible for that. Usually there are two kernels - one where lots of things works, but its old, not supported by community and incomplete modern one supported by community. OS / cheap component / user land usually does not matter.

 

50 minutes ago, Misho said:

I want too much

 

Anything you asks from Armbian is too much. Yearly budget for R&D from public side is 0 since your donations only covers running electricity / bandwidth costs, help with infrastructure upgrades. Whatever you get from this project is already a gift. I understand your frustration, but "simple" things you want, are / can be expensive projects which are far out of our reach to finance (we can only abuse our private cash which we already do).  However, our main focus is to secure a base, not high level stuff like you want. You don't want to have yet another rotten system that looks nice from a surface (video playing inside the browser), but everything else sucks and you can't even change that browser without breaking video playing feature. That is how Android / legacy kernel based OSes looks like. When you look behind the curtains. When you start to use them.

 

50 minutes ago, Misho said:

What about GPU drivers in Armbian?

They are present but GPU is not responsible for playing video. GPU (mali,panfrost,bigtrost, ...) only know how to deal with 3D / for games, for KODI UI. Video acceleration is a method of bypassing standard implementation. Different for each version of hardware / chip (family). The expensive stuff! We don't even pay attention to the status of development since already keping things up2date is a cost we need to cover from private pockets. Once POC - to play video within video player - is done is just a first step. If you want to get that to the browser is yet another complicated problems. And with Chromium is not the same as with Firefox. Ofc you want to have both and also on some exotic? Yes, some standards exits, but dealing with this exceeds Armbian doers for several ten times. And it is "just" for playing bypassed video inside a browser. Workarounds exists but they are usually on the "not acceptable" levels. 

Do some research on this forum. I think there is also some video from Fosdem about this problematic. Problem is not related to this board or this chip only.

[Misho]

Thanks for your time and reply, and clarification,

 

I am newbie at linux, so i am trying just to understand how the things works...

 

So, maybe i can stick with rpi4 and can live with it...? As you said, its a long way, and rpi4 is maybe better choice to future, due to supported SW by devs?

 

But i have one more question. Can you explain me, why Android OS, which is based also on Linux is working smoothly? 3D / 2D graphics, no tearing, everything is going nicely... Are there different drivers? Or what is the point?

 

Thanks,

[Igor]

2 hours ago, Misho said:

Or what is the point?

Armbian is based on open source software which is IMO the only warranty for our bright future and where its worth investing our precious time into. Everything else (Android, closed 3D drivers, Rpi, ... ) is fully dependent on corporations who owns closed libraries, licences, patents and which can and do decide how and when "open source software" will work or stop working.

Most if not all Androids are running private Linux forks interacting with lots of closed libraries for this and that - those libraries are usually locked to one kernel and can't be reused elsewhere. You can't upgrade anything. FOSS - on the other side - has to reverse engineer those libraries which interact with hardware or write them from scratch. Running pure and true open source Linux is a rare luxury. Especially in ARM world. Running it with open 3D drivers and open video accelerating routines is expensive / luxury ... but we are getting there.