12-19-2017, 05:55 AM
Hello community,
I've recently got my Rock64 (4GB). For now however, I'm rather disappointed.
I already tried out several Debian and Ubuntu images, hoping to get proper video performance out of it, so far all of them only gave me disappointment and frustration.
First of all, the Rock64's intended use is for both a lightweight server (apache, sftp) and as Addon to make my TV smart(Netflix, YouTube, web surfing in general, emulators for SNES etc.). I know that the TV part can be done by Android, but the server part can't. Also I prefer a direct Linux over Android. I'm wondering how I even get such bad performance (as example, YouTube was insanely choppy in the xenial MATE build, but it all felt somewhat sluggish anyway and Debian Jessie with GNOME3 on top was pure horror), considering that I've read about good support from the hardware vendors site. Both examples I've just mentionened made use of software rendering rather than hardware rendering(YouTube in both Chromium and Firefox pushed the CPU to 100%, the test of GNOME3 showed me llvmpipe as graphics device rather than any actual GPU and a look at the CPU usage caused by gnome-shell confirmed that it was software rendering) and that's where I wonder if there is a way to fix this. I mean if there is proper support for all of this on Android (which I'll probably test just for fun) and the hardware devs are (at least if I’ve read that correctly) open to provide their divers for Linux aswell, why can’t I then get proper h264 and openGL ES support (later at least for GNOME3, but interestingly enough, GLXGears on the other hand ran with 60FPS but looked choppy on display). I have similar issues for my Pine A64-LTS aswell, but that belongs into a different thread.
I really hope for support/information, as I bought this board with good expectations in the great hardware on paper and just hope it’s some software stuff I’m doing wrong. If there are questions remaining, I’d love to answer them.
Greetings, Max
I've recently got my Rock64 (4GB). For now however, I'm rather disappointed.
I already tried out several Debian and Ubuntu images, hoping to get proper video performance out of it, so far all of them only gave me disappointment and frustration.
First of all, the Rock64's intended use is for both a lightweight server (apache, sftp) and as Addon to make my TV smart(Netflix, YouTube, web surfing in general, emulators for SNES etc.). I know that the TV part can be done by Android, but the server part can't. Also I prefer a direct Linux over Android. I'm wondering how I even get such bad performance (as example, YouTube was insanely choppy in the xenial MATE build, but it all felt somewhat sluggish anyway and Debian Jessie with GNOME3 on top was pure horror), considering that I've read about good support from the hardware vendors site. Both examples I've just mentionened made use of software rendering rather than hardware rendering(YouTube in both Chromium and Firefox pushed the CPU to 100%, the test of GNOME3 showed me llvmpipe as graphics device rather than any actual GPU and a look at the CPU usage caused by gnome-shell confirmed that it was software rendering) and that's where I wonder if there is a way to fix this. I mean if there is proper support for all of this on Android (which I'll probably test just for fun) and the hardware devs are (at least if I’ve read that correctly) open to provide their divers for Linux aswell, why can’t I then get proper h264 and openGL ES support (later at least for GNOME3, but interestingly enough, GLXGears on the other hand ran with 60FPS but looked choppy on display). I have similar issues for my Pine A64-LTS aswell, but that belongs into a different thread.
I really hope for support/information, as I bought this board with good expectations in the great hardware on paper and just hope it’s some software stuff I’m doing wrong. If there are questions remaining, I’d love to answer them.
Greetings, Max
