4k Output on the Tinkerboard?

[doja]

Just got my new tinkerboard powered up with armbian. For some reason I could not get anything after build 1.3 off the Asus site to boot!

 

Anway, first impressions good, however in the graphics settings it seems to max out at 1920 x 1080 whilst on paper the tinkerboard is supposed to support 4k.  I'll admit I am new to linux so perhaps i'm missing something ovbious, but if someone could explain how I can up the resolution to 3,840 x 2,160 that would be great. For the avoidance of doubt I have it connected to an Acer 27" 4k monitor.

[chwe]

According to their faq it's scalled to 4k from 1080P.

Quote

4. How powerful is the GPU processing

Tinker Board has an integrated ARM Mali GPU T760 MP4 supports up to up-scaled 4K from 1080P, and the GPU also supports H.264/H.265 4K hardware decoder for 4K content display

Whenever the GPU is able to hardware decode 4K, doesn't mean that the software is able to do it... 

 

1 hour ago, doja said:

Just got my new tinkerboard powered up with armbian. For some reason I could not get anything after build 1.3 off the Asus site to boot!

IMO, don't think about 4K as long as your tinker runs not smoothly & stable with provided tinker OS.

From TinkerOS 1.9:

Quote

14.Improve the stability of 4K media player.
15.Fix some issues for 4K Display.

Seems that they still work on a stable 4K player.

 

From the armbian dowloadpage:

Quote

• Severe powering troubles due to Micro USB power connector. It’s recommended to power through GPIO pins to prevent under-voltage issues (instabilities, boot/crash cycles).

And a must read too. The tinker is a cool board from specs, but has some hardware fails. It's claimed to be a RPi with much more power, but on software side it's still WIP. 

Just have a look on the open issues in the Rockchip subforum here (mine is lying around until I find motivation to play more with it. Sorry @TonyMac32 weather was too good and I was sailing during weekend ).

[TonyMac32]

The FAQ is totally incorrect, it is actually true 4K.  Their initial release used a "fake" 4k where it was up-scaled, why, honestly I don't know.  Now, the Legacy kernel works with 4k on my Samsung, however I am aware that some Acer products are... different.  I believe I saw a patch related to this, I can take a look.  The Next and Dev kernels do not yet have 4k support, I haven't rounded up everything needed, and the DRM system has gone through some changes since 4.4, so it's not a drop it in and go situation.

 

their 4k video player is the QT based one found in the rockchip repo.

 

@chwe I understand, I was actually outdoors repairing some masonry, I had to rebuild/replace some sections of a 70 year old wall.  Beautiful weather for it, and a good excuse to work with my hands.

 

[chwe]

On 3.8.2017 at 2:31 AM, TonyMac32 said:

Acer products are... different.

I thought shit instead of different would be a better word for it (I cross compile Armbian on a 6 years old horribly overloaded acer aspire s3 notebook with VirtualBox. It tooks me normally around 6 hours to cross compile armbian ) As long as I don't setted up my workstation (I5 with 8gb ram and SSD) there's no opportunity for me to cross compile armbian to do tests with my tinker board. 

[zador.blood.stained]

8 minutes ago, chwe said:

I cross compile Armbian on a 6 years old horribly overloaded acer aspire s3 notebook with VirtualBox. It tooks me normally around 6 hours to cross compile armbian

What OS and how much RAM do you have there? 6 hours sounds like too much for a 6 years old HW. And I hope that it is 6 hours for the full image, not only the kernel.

 

Regarding 4k and monitors - IMO the only way to solve this would be dumping the EDID and checking if it has any issues. Regardless of hardware quality supported and preferred video modes should be controlled by EDID data.

[chwe]

3 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

What OS and how much RAM do you have there? 6 hours sounds like too much for a 6 years old HW. And I hope that it is 6 hours for the full image, not only the kernel.

Yeah, not only for kernel (It was mainline kernel for an OrangePi PC Plus with the openmediavault stuff too). Problem is that the hole system has only 4gb ram, a slow HDD and just to make it worser so much of garbage on the system (It's my 'test stupid things' notebook). I'm sure, working on a freshly installed windows/linux with only virtual box on it, it would cross compile in a reasonable time.  

[zador.blood.stained]

5 minutes ago, chwe said:

I'm sure, working on a freshly installed windows/linux with only virtual box on it, it would cross compile in a reasonable time.  

If you had a Linux installation there then Docker may give you a better performance (or rather less performance drop) than full virtualization, though you would be still bottlenecked by HDD in some tasks.

[chwe]

Anyway I'll move everything to a desktop workstation with I5 (think it was a 2500 series CPU) with more ram (8GB) and an older SSD (surely not a development system for professionals but better than the laptop and should be fast enough for me).  If cross compile would be a daily task, I'll surely think about upgrade my system.

Just for interest, how long does it need for you to compile a full armbian?

[zador.blood.stained]

18 minutes ago, chwe said:

Just for interest, how long does it need for you to compile a full armbian?

Fresh mainline kernel compilation (new version or cleared ccache) - ~50 minutes

Mainline kernel recompilation - ~5-6 minutes

 

Don't have fresh logs with full image builds, but debootstrapping Xenial (with apt-cacher-ng) will also take about an hour, and reusing prebuilt rootfs cache will take ~10-15 minutes.

 

BTW my current build host is based on a ~10 years old Acer Aspire OEM motherboard (desktop), and I can't say that hardware quality is crap (it still works), but software (BIOS) definitely could be better.