Bananapi BPI-F3 Slow and Glitchy

[Human Being]

The graphical interface is very slow and glitchy when I booted my BPI-F3 running the latest Armbian provided (Ubuntu variant). The cursor glitches in and out, and it takes forever for the onboard display to open applications, display text typed in, etc (It took around 5 minutes to open System Monitor, and 1 Minute to open Terminal). I have accessed it also via SSH and a USB-Serial converter, and those respond very quickly, therefore I think It has something to do with GPU support. I also found this other version with GPU acceleration, albeit an older version of Armbian, which ran fine. Mine currently boots off of EMMC and runs off of NVME (although the same was when I initially ran off of an SD card) How could I fix this issue?

[Werner]

Hi

 

Providing logs with

 

PASTE_SERVER_HOST=paste.armbian.de armbianmonitor -u

 

 helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

 

 

[Human Being]

Here are the logs: https://paste.armbian.de/bewufunaqu

[going]

1 час назад, Human Being сказал:

Here are the logs: https://paste.armbian.de/bewufunaqu

[    0.000000] Linux version 6.6.73-current-spacemit (build@armbian)
               (riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc (Ubuntu 13.2.0-23ubuntu4) 13.2.0,
               GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.42) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jan 21 12:19:25 UTC 2025
[    0.000000] Machine model: BananaPi BPI-F3
[    0.000000] SBI specification v1.0 detected
[    0.000000] SBI implementation ID=0x1 Version=0x10003
[    0.000000] SBI IPI extension detected
[    0.000000] SBI RFENCE extension detected

Maybe Patrick @c0rnelius can shed some light on this issue?

 

6 часов назад, Human Being сказал:

How could I fix this issue?

It's still in development.
Please join the development.

Code source: https://gitee.com/bianbu-linux

 

Today, only the following has been added to the build system: (spacemit.conf)

opensbi, u-boot-spacemit, linux-bianbu

But this is not enough for full-fledged work.

 

Welcome!

[c0rnelius]

I rarely use an SBC with a head. I suspect packages need to be created to bring in proper GUI support.

[going]

1 час назад, c0rnelius сказал:

I rarely use an SBC with a head. I suspect packages need to be created to bring in proper GUI support.

Yes. I'm hinting at the same thing.
We need to make some additional packages.
But the build system lacks a simple or general mechanism for assembling/reassembling debian packages.

 

[Human Being]

11 hours ago, going said:

But the build system lacks a simple or general mechanism for assembling/reassembling debian packages.

That makes sense.  

 

15 hours ago, going said:

Code source: https://gitee.com/bianbu-linux

I looked at that and it's clear how Spacemit is only supporting Bianbu thus far, and not providing packages for OS's. I noticed they do have the packages for such support but as mentioned by Going they only support them in use with Bianbu. 

Thank you all very much for the help! This has been very informative on my journey with this board.

[Igor]

On 1/23/2025 at 12:04 AM, Human Being said:

I looked at that and it's clear how Spacemit is only supporting Bianbu

 

https://gitee.com/bianbu-linux#introduction
This is a BSP (board support package) which usually consist from:

- kernel
- boot loader

- libraries for this and that functionality

- fw flashing tools
- userspace hacks

- some tech documentation

... 

In embedded world, OS is usually custom to cover certain case. One have to build OS (with for big team tools = buildroot / yocto, while Armbian provide more human approach to make and to use. We are assembling all those elements (instead / for you) + OS generation which is distributed similar to other Linux distros.

 

I agree we don't have good mechanisms for generating normal Debian packages. However, board userspace hacks can be put to our board support Debian package. Example: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/config/boards/gateway-gz80x.conf#L15-L19

[Human Being]

I want to say that Armbian, for any developer listening, has been a pleasure to use, of its stability features. Running my board off a name via Arbitbian-config has been very nice. I would like to let you all know that I have found a solution (sorta) to the slow desktop environment for anyone interested in this. It appears that currently, it is using Softpipe for its graphics rendering (I am no expert in any of this, I am trying to learn). What I did (unintentionally) was getting llvmpipe working. With llvmpipe, the desktop environment works much snappier and is pretty usable (even though it is not using the GPU). I am not too sure how I got this working, but what appears to be my steps is first compiling the MESA drivers from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/imagination/mesa. Then what I did was download the source code from https://bianbu.spacemit.com/en/development/kernel_compile/. After applying these, the desktop environment became much snappier. The thing though is the kernel I compiled was not being used, so I am not sure what I exactly did. I am very new to working with this kinda thing so if anyone more experienced wants to shed some light on what I did that would be great. 

[c0rnelius]

My guess is, the bulk of the GUI issues stems from the version of Mesa being used. Try the one in their repo; https://gitee.com/bianbu-linux/mesa3d/tree/bl-v2.0.y/