CSC Armbian for RK3288 TV Box boards (Q8)

[Friedolino]

after ordering the zhilai from aliexpress yesterday which means waiting for weeks I couldn't resist ordering today the FiiO Taishan D03K which will arrive tomorrow.

 

Unfortunately i still have no luck with the booting from emmc. I wrote the beginning of the mmcblk0 to the mmbblk2 with dd. didn't work. then i wrote rk32loader*.bin to mmcblk2boot0. also without success.

[Friedolino]

just tried audio out via hdmi. I can see the level in PulseAudio Volume Meter. But i cant hear anything. on the tv set.

 

my first research showed this:

 

ugoos@ugoos2:~$ dmesg | grep audio
[    1.506931] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[    2.751278] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,hp-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-spdif[0]'
[    2.751285] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,mic-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-spdif[0]'
[   11.090107] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,hp-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-hdmi[0]'
[   11.090124] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,mic-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-hdmi[0]'
 

is this a problem?

[jock]

3 hours ago, Friedolino said:

after ordering the zhilai from aliexpress yesterday which means waiting for weeks I couldn't resist ordering today the FiiO Taishan D03K which will arrive tomorrow.

 

Unfortunately i still have no luck with the booting from emmc. I wrote the beginning of the mmcblk0 to the mmbblk2 with dd. didn't work. then i wrote rk32loader*.bin to mmcblk2boot0. also without success.

Normally writing the beginning of mmcblk0 to mmcblk2 substitutes the partition table wrote by armbian-config script on the eMMC with the one from the SDCard. Since the sdcard is usually bigger, it is not wise to overwrite the partition table tailored for the eMMC by armbian-config.

 

To transfer correctly u-boot from mmcblk0 to mmcblk2 you should copy a small but sufficient amount of data this way:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 skip=64 seek=64 count=2048 conv=sync,fsync

This way you copy 1 megabyte (u-boot is around 600 kbytes, the rest are zeros) starting from sdcard at sector 64 to the eMMC at sector 64.

 

You may also try to install armbian on the eMMC and then boot with an USB stick plugged (use the non-OTG ports) and without the sdcard inserted. If u-boot on the eMMC is booting correctly, it should detect the USB stick and boot from there.

 

[jock]

22 minutes ago, Friedolino said:

just tried audio out via hdmi. I can see the level in PulseAudio Volume Meter. But i cant hear anything. on the tv set.

 

my first research showed this:

 

ugoos@ugoos2:~$ dmesg | grep audio
[    1.506931] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[    2.751278] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,hp-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-spdif[0]'
[    2.751285] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,mic-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-spdif[0]'
[   11.090107] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,hp-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-hdmi[0]'
[   11.090124] of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'simple-audio-card,mic-det-gpio' property of node '/soundcard-hdmi[0]'
 

is this a problem?

Nope, this is expected.

Try to unplug and replug the HDMI cable (or turn the TV off and on). It is a strange but common issue I guess with the HDMI driver.

 

edit: also check from the speaker icon on the upper-right side that pulseaudio is sinking to HDMI and not to spdif

[Friedolino]

34 minutes ago, jock said:

To transfer correctly u-boot from mmcblk0 to mmcblk2 you should copy a small but sufficient amount of data this way:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 skip=64 seek=64 count=2048 conv=sync,fsync

This way you copy 1 megabyte (u-boot is around 600 kbytes, the rest are zeros) starting from sdcard at sector 64 to the eMMC at sector 64.

 

You may also try to install armbian on the eMMC and then boot with an USB stick plugged (use the non-OTG ports) and without the sdcard inserted. If u-boot on the eMMC is booting correctly, it should detect the USB stick and boot from there.

 

 

 

it worked with your dd command. Now it boots from emmc. Thank You. It seems like I had already emmc as root partition as all my files are still there in the home directory. must have been some strange startup via maskrom->sdcard uboot->emmc.

Edit: Or it was the install script, that copied everything...

Just found evidence. some files on the sdcard have been modified later.

 

[Friedolino]

2 hours ago, jock said:

 

Try to unplug and replug the HDMI cable (or turn the TV off and on). It is a strange but common issue I guess with the HDMI driver.

replugging also worked. it's great!

[jeanrhum]

Hi jock,

 

Thanks for your work, I am able to boot my ugoos ut3s with your 4.18.6 image (haven't tried others). In my case, wifi doesn't work. I suppose my box haven't the same wireless chip as yours. Will make additionnal testing and will try to fix that later.

 

[Friedolino]

I have a Tronsmart Orion R28 running with the ugoos UT3 image for maybe two years now. I think I switch there to armbian, too, if it works well. With the UT3s.

 

Did you try find out the wifi chip with lspci and modprobe the correct driver?

[jeanrhum]

I had no time to look at this yesterday, but lspci does not work on most arm board, since, there is no real pci bus like on standard motherboards. I will open the box and look at the chip, or if it's too difficult to read, I suppose I can find this info on the web.

 

Some other elements are not working: reboot, power button and power led.

I didn't test audio, bluetooth seems to work and I successfully installed JMCC's media script.

 

Another annoying fact is that desktop is a bit long to launch (a few minutes) after boot seems to be finished (I can log in console and use the system).

[jock]

Nice to see that it boots on ugoos board

Although I didn't intend to support it, it's nice to see that at least it boots and most of the functionality works!

[jeanrhum]

Even if you don't want to support it, here is the situation with wifi:

- on ugoos ut3s it seems to be ap6335, is it similar for you?

- when i write the folowing commands:

sudo rmmod brcmfmac
sudo modprobe brcmfmac

I have no error on the command line, but on dmesg I can read:

[  190.311691] brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_alloc_request: using brcm/brcmfmac4339-sdio for chip BCM4339/2
[  190.311982] brcmfmac mmc1:0001:1: Direct firmware load for ap6330/brcm/brcmfmac4339-sdio.bin failed with error -2
[  191.313814] brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_htclk: HT Avail timeout (1000000): clkctl 0x50

 

brcmfmac appears with lsmod, but there is no wireless interface with iwconfig. In dmesg, i app6330 is written instead of ap6335, maybe it is the problem.

Have you any clue to solve that?

[martinayotte]

16 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

Direct firmware load for ap6330/brcm/brcmfmac4339-sdio.bin

Do you have this firmware file under /lib/firmware/brcm ?

[jeanrhum]

Yes with many other brcmfac variants.

[jock]

21 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

Even if you don't want to support it, here is the situation with wifi:

- on ugoos ut3s it seems to be ap6335, is it similar for you?

 

brcmfmac appears with lsmod, but there is no wireless interface with iwconfig. In dmesg, i app6330 is written instead of ap6335, maybe it is the problem.

Have you any clue to solve that?

 

Yes, you are missing the appropriate firmware files.

My box has AP6330, which is manufactured by AmPak and is actually a combo of broadcom chips. In my case it has the BRCM4330 wifi chip and BCM40183 for bluetooth.

 

In your case you have a hint by the brcmfmac driver telling you it is expecting brcmfmac4339-sdio binary file.

 

Now the first thing to do is some tidying up. On your box edit the file /boot/armbianEnv.txt and change this line:

extraargs=brcmfmac.alternative_fw_path=ap6330 cma=64M

into this line:

extraargs=brcmfmac.alternative_fw_path=ap6335 cma=64M

This way we are telling the brcmfmac driver to find all its things into /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm path.

 

Now you can grab the necessary firmware files from this repository: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rkwifibt/tree/master/firmware/broadcom/all

In particular you will need to:

• download the firmware blob fw_bcm4339a0_ag.bin into /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm/brcmfmac4339-sdio.bin (you may also try fw_bcm4339a0_ag_apsta.bin or fw_bcm4339a0_ag_p2p.bin)
• download the nvram configuration nvram_AP6335.txt into /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm/brcmfmac4339-sdio.txt

after a reboot (or modprobing the module) you should have done a step forward to get the wifi working.

A last note: It is possible that you also get bluetooth. At the moment there is a systemd service (ap6330-bluetooth) that loads the bluetooth firmware binary used on the AP6330. In the lucky case the firmware is compatible you also get free bluetooth, but I don't guarantee anything on this.

 

[jeanrhum]

Thanks a lot, wifi works well now with fw_bcm4339a0_ag.bin from github!

In fact those files where in /lib/firmware/brcm/ (as asked by martinayotte) and not in /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm/. I use the ones you told me to download, but I suppose that those in /lib/firmware/brcm/ should also work. You did something special to use this path?

[jock]

10 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

Thanks a lot, wifi works well now with fw_bcm4339a0_ag.bin from github!

In fact those files where in /lib/firmware/brcm/ (as asked by martinayotte) and not in /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm/. I use the ones you told me to download, but I suppose that those in /lib/firmware/brcm/ should also work. You did something special to use this path?

Glad to hear it works!

 

Normally brcmfmac looks into /lib/firmware/brcm directory for its firmware files.

armbianEnv.txt instead sets the kernel command line argument that changes the directory to /lib/firmware/ap6335/brcm, so the driver will look there.

It is just to keep things tidy, as long as other firmware files for broadcom are into their own directories

Also renaming the binary into the filename expected by the driver is essential, without doing this it will never be able to find it.

 

Did you have the chance to try bluetooth too?

[jeanrhum]

No bluetooth is not working. No device is defined. I looked at several ways to add it, but nothing work for now.

[jeanrhum]

I found that bt chip should be supported by mainline kernel, but relevant info have to be defined in device tree: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/net/broadcom-bluetooth.txt

I suppose that your chip is also concerned, but I'm a totally newbie concerning device tree. I tried to decompile your current dtb, but then I'm not able to make the relevant modifications to then compile and get a working dtb. The dtc command asks for uart2_pins in the best case and I don't know how to configure them.

Is there somebody else who make such broadcom bluetooth chip working with mainline?

As I understand, only allwinner chips support overlays, because armbian-add-overlay returns an error claiming that.

[jock]

7 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

I found that bt chip should be supported by mainline kernel, but relevant info have to be defined in device tree: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/net/broadcom-bluetooth.txt

I suppose that your chip is also concerned, but I'm a totally newbie concerning device tree. I tried to decompile your current dtb, but then I'm not able to make the relevant modifications to then compile and get a working dtb. The dtc command asks for uart2_pins in the best case and I don't know how to configure them.

Is there somebody else who make such broadcom bluetooth chip working with mainline?

As I understand, only allwinner chips support overlays, because armbian-add-overlay returns an error claiming that.

at the moment my bluetooth chip is not described in the device tree. Your finding could be nice although, but I think it works only for a small amount of bluetooth chips (guessing from the documentation above, just one chip).

Normally it is enough to load the correct firmware file for your chip using the brcm_patchram_plus utility (this what I do for my AP6330) without bothering the device trees at all, so I guess that if you know the bluetooth chip which is inside your AP6335, the next step is find the firmware file for it (usually a file with .hcd extension) and try to modify /lib/systemd/system/ap6330-bluetooth.service file to load the new firmware

[Sergei Steshenko]

Hello,

 

do the provided images include accelerated video drivers ?

 

If yes, how can I check that the drivers are configured correctly ?

 

If no, is there a chance that packages provided by Debian per https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics will work ? And if so, which of the provided images is most likely to work with the drivers ?

[jock]

1 hour ago, Sergei Steshenko said:

Hello,

 

do the provided images include accelerated video drivers ?

 

If yes, how can I check that the drivers are configured correctly ?

 

If no, is there a chance that packages provided by Debian per https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics will work ? And if so, which of the provided images is most likely to work with the drivers ?

 

Hi!

The images are vanilla armbian, so they don't have video drivers installed; though in the first post of this thread you can find a link to the media script thread for RK3288 provided by @JMCC which downloads and installs all the necessary bits for GPU drivers and VPU libraries for hardware video decoding. Hardware video decoding works only on legacy 4.4 kernel, GPU acceleration instead works fine up to latest 4.18 kernel.

 

To check if GPU drivers are correctly installed you can install mesa-utils-extra package and run es2_info utility, which should report ARM Mali T76x as OpenGL ES renderer (if it reports LLVM, then you are using software rendering)

 

[Sergei Steshenko]

51 minutes ago, jock said:

 

Hi!

The images are vanilla armbian, so they don't have video drivers installed; though in the first post of this thread you can find a link to the media script thread for RK3288 provided by @JMCC which downloads and installs all the necessary bits for GPU drivers and VPU libraries for hardware video decoding. Hardware video decoding works only on legacy 4.4 kernel, GPU acceleration instead works fine up to latest 4.18 kernel.

 

To check if GPU drivers are correctly installed you can install mesa-utils-extra package and run es2_info utility, which should report ARM Mali T76x as OpenGL ES renderer (if it reports LLVM, then you are using software rendering)

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

I went to the very first post and ultimately landed at

. So I guess I have to study and follow instructions in the thread.

 

Also, since I want all possible acceleration, according to "Hardware video decoding works only on legacy 4.4 kernel" part of your reply my understanding is that I need a legacy kernel image.

 

The very first post (

) has two links to Ubuntu legacy images:

 

1) "Armbian Ubuntu Xenial 5.41 Desktop - Kernel 4.4.126 (legacy)" - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qqlJAJSO_sPG96LOz9X3UBplnWlZ5EJs ;

2) "Armbian Ubuntu Xenial 5.46 Desktop - Kernel 4.4.132 (legacy)" - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iNTYBmaqeYRmmP-znp5V4Hs2Wjr9e2SQ  . This link is dead.

 

The second link is a newer version - that's why I wanted to use it. Is the link dead for a "random" reason or it was intentionally removed because there is a problem with the image ?

 

If the image was good, could you please re-upload it and correct the link ?

 

Thanks in advance.

[jock]

Oops! Thanks for pointing me the dead link.

Legacy kernel is developed by rockchip itself, in the last months they made some breaking changes which produced unstable or crashing images.

I actually removed the image with kernel 4.4.132, but you may try these test images:

• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.159
• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.153
• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.152
• Armbian Xenial 5.52 4.4.139

Be aware there's a good chance they crash at boot without anything on screen. if you report any of them which works decently for you and does not crash I will put it in the first post.

Otherwise I'm pretty sure the 4.4.126 image was working fine.

 

About the media script, it is quite straightforward and should work flawlessy.

I'm eagerly waiting for JMCC to publish its latest updated work for Ubuntu Bionic, when it will be available I will publish some Bionic images too

[Sergei Steshenko]

12 hours ago, jock said:

Oops! Thanks for pointing me the dead link.

Legacy kernel is developed by rockchip itself, in the last months they made some breaking changes which produced unstable or crashing images.

I actually removed the image with kernel 4.4.132, but you may try these test images:

• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.159
• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.153
• Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.152
• Armbian Xenial 5.52 4.4.139

Be aware there's a good chance they crash at boot without anything on screen. if you report any of them which works decently for you and does not crash I will put it in the first post.

Otherwise I'm pretty sure the 4.4.126 image was working fine.

 

About the media script, it is quite straightforward and should work flawlessy.

I'm eagerly waiting for JMCC to publish its latest updated work for Ubuntu Bionic, when it will be available I will publish some Bionic images too

 

There are problems with all of the listed images. For example, when I click on  Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.152 , I arrive to Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.152_desktop.img.xz . Pay attention to the 'bionic' part in the actual file name instead of Xenial. I tried this image, and it kinda works, but is not usable in practice. When the image boots, first several lines of the boot log text screen look normal, and then something happens to the font (as if there is significant phase shift in the pixel clock), and the font becomes practically unreadable.

 

By guessing I managed to enter root and regular user passwords, and the boot process arrived to graphical desktop stage, but the font problem persists. So I stopped trying this image.

 

"Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.159" and "Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.153" apparently do not boot at all. I.e. I see no text on screen.

 

I don't remember what the problem was with Armbian Xenial 5.52 4.4.139.

 

So I decided to try to use Armbian_5.41_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_default_4.4.126_desktop.img from the very first post. It boots OK and appears to work, but after several minutes of Internet usage (be it Shoutcast or an attempt to download that media testing script) the whole thing locks up.

 

I am not yet sure what the real cause of the lockup is. On one hand, today is a hot day, and my board is such that it has NO heat sink on the CPU. So the board can banally overheat.

 

On the other hand, several days ago I tried "Armbian Ubuntu Xenial 5.59 Desktop - Kernel 4.14.68 (mainline) (eMMC friendly)" from the very first post on the same board with, of course, still no heat sink on the CPU. The board was working quite well for several hours. It was playing music from different Internet sites through the web browser with no lockups. After several hours of testing I simply turned the board off. The ambient temperature was lower.

 

So I think I need to install a heat sink on the CPU and try again. Just to make things clear - I haven't yet been able to try that media testing because of the lockups.

[jock]

2 hours ago, Sergei Steshenko said:

 

There are problems with all of the listed images. For example, when I click on  Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.152 , I arrive to Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.152_desktop.img.xz . Pay attention to the 'bionic' part in the actual file name instead of Xenial. I tried this image, and it kinda works, but is not usable in practice. When the image boots, first several lines of the boot log text screen look normal, and then something happens to the font (as if there is significant phase shift in the pixel clock), and the font becomes practically unreadable.

 

By guessing I managed to enter root and regular user passwords, and the boot process arrived to graphical desktop stage, but the font problem persists. So I stopped trying this image.

 

"Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.159" and "Armbian Xenial 5.59 4.4.153" apparently do not boot at all. I.e. I see no text on screen.

 

I don't remember what the problem was with Armbian Xenial 5.52 4.4.139.

 

So I decided to try to use Armbian_5.41_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_default_4.4.126_desktop.img from the very first post. It boots OK and appears to work, but after several minutes of Internet usage (be it Shoutcast or an attempt to download that media testing script) the whole thing locks up.

 

I am not yet sure what the real cause of the lockup is. On one hand, today is a hot day, and my board is such that it has NO heat sink on the CPU. So the board can banally overheat.

 

On the other hand, several days ago I tried "Armbian Ubuntu Xenial 5.59 Desktop - Kernel 4.14.68 (mainline) (eMMC friendly)" from the very first post on the same board with, of course, still no heat sink on the CPU. The board was working quite well for several hours. It was playing music from different Internet sites through the web browser with no lockups. After several hours of testing I simply turned the board off. The ambient temperature was lower.

 

So I think I need to install a heat sink on the CPU and try again. Just to make things clear - I haven't yet been able to try that media testing because of the lockups.

 

Mmmh, I'm sorry the default kernel images don't work, but I'm not surprised. Those were some test images I did to poke around and see if the mainline kernel was in a working state or not.

Anyway, the overheating problem is actually real on default images, which as far as I remember, don't have an overheating temperature control, so probably you guessed right. You may limit the speed of the cores using cpufreq-set and install a heatsink, which is a must have for rk3288

 

Mainline images instead have the thermal driver working and start throttling when the CPU or GPU reaches 70°C. armbianmonitor -m command may be useful to monitor the temperatures in realtime.

By the way I prefer to use mainline images for my own general usage even though there is no video acceleration for the moment, latest 4.18 kernel also proved to be quite stable in my experience.

 

I will try to make a new default image soon to see if it is working, I will let you know.

 

edit: about the phase shift of the pixel clock, it's something I noticed on my fullhd monitor also and only on default kernels. Rockchip people removed some clock entries from the device tree which made HDMI and serial work really bad. I opened an issue about that, but noone did care about. I restored the missing entries in my branch and HDMI was working again, but still I have some artifacts in the form of horizontal flashing colored lines, which is clearly related to bad clocks

[Sergei Steshenko]

2 hours ago, jock said:

 

Mmmh, I'm sorry the default kernel images don't work, but I'm not surprised. Those were some test images I did to poke around and see if the mainline kernel was in a working state or not.

Anyway, the overheating problem is actually real on default images, which as far as I remember, don't have an overheating temperature control, so probably you guessed right. You may limit the speed of the cores using cpufreq-set and install a heatsink, which is a must have for rk3288

 

Mainline images instead have the thermal driver working and start throttling when the CPU or GPU reaches 70°C. armbianmonitor -m command may be useful to monitor the temperatures in realtime.

By the way I prefer to use mainline images for my own general usage even though there is no video acceleration for the moment, latest 4.18 kernel also proved to be quite stable in my experience.

 

I will try to make a new default image soon to see if it is working, I will let you know.

 

edit: about the phase shift of the pixel clock, it's something I noticed on my fullhd monitor also and only on default kernels. Rockchip people removed some clock entries from the device tree which made HDMI and serial work really bad. I opened an issue about that, but noone did care about. I restored the missing entries in my branch and HDMI was working again, but still I have some artifacts in the form of horizontal flashing colored lines, which is clearly related to bad clocks

I've installed heat sinks.

 

I've installed one 15mm x 15mm x 6mm on RAM and two of the same dimensions on CPU. I used what they call heatsink plaster (it's a kind of glue), so the two on the CPU are side to side and hold pretty well. CPU is still hot, but the legacy image does not lock up after several minutes, it lasts much longer. Overall my impression of the legacy image is that it is "flaky" with video acceleration.

 

I  will try Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_next_4.14.68_desktop.img with video acceleration.

 

Thanks a lot for detailed explanations.

[Sergei Steshenko]

Several updates on Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_next_4.14.68_desktop.img image.

 

The two heatsinks of 15mm x 15mm x 6mm are not big enough for the CPU, though their presence is much better than no heatsink.

 

I've replaced them with a single 20mm x 20mm x 15mm heatsink, and even this one is not sufficiently big. Temperature pretty quickly reaches 70C according to armbianmonitor, and CPU frequency is in 1512 .. 1608MHz range. So I'd say this heatsink is almost sufficient, but even a bigger one is needed. My criterion of big enough heatsink for the CPU is that the CPU should never reach 70C under maximum load and maximum frequency.

 

The MPV player (I tried it after using the media script) is essentially unusable. After it begin playing video the ability control desktop/system is lost. I.e. neither mouse nor keyboard works in any way. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work, switching to a virtual console doesn't work. The player continues to play video (both image and sound), but control of the computer is lost (maybe it can be achieved through 'ssh' from another computer, but I haven't tried).

 

And I was looking for some kind of software management in the window manager main menu - the one invoked by clicking on the upper left corner of the screen, and I found nothing of the kind. Did I miss something obvious ?

[Sergei Steshenko]

1 hour ago, Sergei Steshenko said:

Several updates on Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_next_4.14.68_desktop.img image.

 

The two heatsinks of 15mm x 15mm x 6mm are not big enough for the CPU, though their presence is much better than no heatsink.

 

I've replaced them with a single 20mm x 20mm x 15mm heatsink, and even this one is not sufficiently big. Temperature pretty quickly reaches 70C according to armbianmonitor, and CPU frequency is in 1512 .. 1608MHz range. So I'd say this heatsink is almost sufficient, but even a bigger one is needed. My criterion of big enough heatsink for the CPU is that the CPU should never reach 70C under maximum load and maximum frequency.

 

The MPV player (I tried it after using the media script) is essentially unusable. After it begin playing video the ability control desktop/system is lost. I.e. neither mouse nor keyboard works in any way. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work, switching to a virtual console doesn't work. The player continues to play video (both image and sound), but control of the computer is lost (maybe it can be achieved through 'ssh' from another computer, but I haven't tried).

 

And I was looking for some kind of software management in the window manager main menu - the one invoked by clicking on the upper left corner of the screen, and I found nothing of the kind. Did I miss something obvious ?

And I have also tried Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_dev_4.18.6_desktop.img .

 

The good news is that MPV now is useful. I.e. keyboard and mouse work, one doesn't lose control of the system.

 

The bad news is there is no sound. The controls show I2S and analog outputs, but not HDMI. In the previous images sound was playing through HDMI.

 

I still see no software management menu entries.

[jock]

1 hour ago, Sergei Steshenko said:

And I have also tried Armbian_5.59_Xt-q8l-v10_Ubuntu_xenial_dev_4.18.6_desktop.img .

 

The good news is that MPV now is useful. I.e. keyboard and mouse work, one doesn't lose control of the system.

 

The bad news is there is no sound. The controls show I2S and analog outputs, but not HDMI. In the previous images sound was playing through HDMI.

 

I still see no software management menu entries.

 

HDMI has still some minor issues: it may happen that a purple vertical line appears on left edge of the screen, or audio does not work. Normally it is sufficient to turn the monitor off and on and purple line disappears and audio comes back. Pulseaudio also has some issues with labels, but I2S should be in reality HDMI (on my setup both SPDIF and HDMI appears as "Analog audio" )

 

Some trick you may try:

1) Disable compositing from Menu -> Settings -> Window Manager Tricks - this is pretty essential for decent desktop speed

2) The image you are using probably has devfreq compiled in. Devfreq handles the GPU frequency dynamically, but at the moment it is not so "dynamic" and keeps the GPU at lowest frequency (100 Mhz). Anyway the good thing is that you can change the frequency of the GPU at manually invoking echo 300000000 > /sys/class/devfreq/devfreq0/min_freq as root to force the GPU to run at least at 300 Mhz (which is the default frequency without devfreq).

3) Be sure that OpenGL ES setup is in place (use es2_info for that) and be sure that MPV uses OpenGL ES rendering. This is important because otherwise screen blitting happens on slow software paths

 

I also installed packaged Kodi (Isengard), which was pleasantly working.

 

I planned to raise a bit the throttling temperature, maybe at least 75°C. It should be relatively far from the critical threshold (apparently 90°C).

Also it would be interesting to see what happens turning down the voltage at highest speeds, just to see what is the limit for the SoC. This can be done via device tree, but providing additional device trees can be problematic..

 

At the moment I compiled a couple of new images (default and dev kernels), but the recent bump of u-boot to v2018.09 broke something and they don't boot. I hope to sort things out this weekend

 

[Sergei Steshenko]

Any news on new images ?