[Update] Orangepi One (H3) and hw accelerations questions

[f82]

Hello,

I got a Orange Pi One H3 based board with the usual 512MB DDR3 ram and  never used it much but lately I'm trying to use it as an everyday home computer, so I'm trying to push the hardware as much as possible to benefit from any features.

I actually have installed latest armbian v5.9.x kernel o.s. with Buster distribution and with some zram usage it's quite acceptable on the speed side. I had to add an heatsink on the SoC cause after latest mainline kernel temperature it seems to get close easier to 80°C degrees and even if I suppose it might work even at these temps, I think it was better to lower it down a bit (probably 5° to 10°C degrees). No overclocking and max 1.0Ghz.

I'd like to ask if with these kernel version is still possible to install OpenGL drivers and video hw decoding drivers to use some sw like Vlc or Smplayer to see how well it works with media file and games. On the kernel modules I can already see there's a sunxi-cedrus module, v4l2_mem2mem, videobuf2_dma_config/memops/v4l2 modules, Lima DRM and GPU scheduler modules too. 

Any guide to follow in case it's possible to install both OGL and VDPAU/whatever hw acceleration?

Thanks

 

 

[Werner]

Moved to p2p since this is more userspace.

As correctly noticed kernel stuff is there but my best guess is that the driver packages Buster ships are simply too old.

Try Bullseye or Groovy for further tests.

[f82]

Thanks, I thought Buster was one of the latest still updated versions so I hope/hoped to make these work even in this distribution. I checked with glxinfo and it clearly says it's using the software opengl renderer not any specific driver. 

Should I reinstall all the o.s. or I can upgrade this one? And aren't the modules usually upgraded along with the kernel installation of the new mainline one?

[Werner]

6 minutes ago, f82 said:

thought Buster was one of the latest still updated versions

While it is still updated and also the latest stable Debian version its packages usually lacking sometimes years behind upstream. Their priority is stability over being up to date.

 

 

 

10 minutes ago, f82 said:

upgrade

Switching from different flavors like Buster to Bullseye is neither tested nor supported. The easiest would be to simply pick a spare sd card and write a bullseye/groovy image to it and give it a try. This way you also do not lose any existing work.

 

10 minutes ago, f82 said:

modules usually upgraded along with the kernel installation

There are two things to consider: The kernel support and the software support. While all Armbian flavors sharing the very same kernel package the software support for things comes from upstream, Ubuntu Focal, Debian Buster/Bullseye and so on. Kernel support for a device is useless if there is no software that can make use of it

 

[f82]

Thanks for the explanation. I imagine also that the main limit will still be the ram that already feels like should be at least double the actual one for such modern kernel/os/apps, but I thought I liked the idea to see the GPU and the video engine working as supposed to be. Even in some older SoC for others well known SBC that used the old ARM11 armv6 cpus, it was impressive to see the omx video engine decoding 1080p test codec on such old architecture with few impact on the cpu usage.  I suppose that given the specs of this H3 chip things might be even better with the right drivers/modules.

[f82]

Update: as suggested that was the problem, I've installed the latest Bullseye distribution with latest kernel and Lima opengl drivers seems to be seen everywhere while glxinfo gives me 0MB of video memory, do I have to set it up somewhere?

Anywhere I'll do some test but it's already a good point even if I had to install xfce desktop cause I didn't know if lxde would have worked the same way with DRI acceleration and Opengl. Maybe there're not many differences but I felt lxde to be a bit faster.

Regarding VDPAU I get this error with vdpauinfo: failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_sun4i-drm.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Do I have to compile it?