I got my hands on an Odroid HC4 to play around a bit, so I decided to try Manjaro ARM. I flash the MicroSD using manjaro-arm-installer, put the card into the board and booted. To my surprise after booting from the card there was no video output at all, but apparently the system booted. I changed vt and hit ctrl-alt-del and the board rebooted.
In the Armbian documentation they say you must erase petitboot for it to boot any recent kernel, so I tried that for Manjaro. To clear petitboot:
The DTB for the HC4 is not yet in mainline kernel. When it does get there, we might look into adding this device.
So, @Glock24 , if you run inxi -M you will notice that it’s booted as an “Odroid C4” and not an Odroid HC4.
Most of the hardware is the same in those devices, so most will work fine.
Everything works except the most important feature of the HC4 which is the SATA controller. Any disk connected to the SATA ports is not detected, I haven’t found a way to make it work.
On a side note 3D acceleration seems to work fine using mesa-git and the linux-rc kernel. I tested just basic games though, supertux and chromuim-bsu.
With the default kernel and mesa package chromium-bsu just showed a black screen, after installing linux-rc and mesa-git it displays correctly and gives around 55fps.
I’ve asked odroid for sample but didn’t get any response from the admin.
Looks like they’re not interested in sending sample to manjaro Arm project.
I used Manjaro-ARM-minimal-hc4-21.03-alpha-unstable.img.xz and as long as I do not update linux-vim, I could boot up from SSD snd microSDRAM. The image’s boot.init has to be modified as “load mmc ${devno}:1 ${dtb_loadaddr} /dtbs/amlogic/meson-sm1-odroid-hc4.dtb”.
I also found out by using “manjaro-arm-installer”, you could generate an image and boot it from microSDRam only, also this image will die randomly. But if I update this image with “linux-vim”, it seems to run smoothly, except has the same problem of directly booting using SSD.