Manjaro arm on Amlogic Tv box?

Thanks to Spikerguy, Manjaro Team and Tripole introducing me to Manjaro and guidance. Keep up the great work.

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Interesting you seem to have precursor/indication when Freeze is going to happen. In my case on GT King Pro kernel panic/freeze usually occur during heavy disk writing (like large system updates or copying files) and in other cases no telling sign can be just opening a new tab or start up and application or in the middle to typing text. But with kernel 5.9.0 and above it seems to be more usable.

I think I might be on to something… If I change the cpu speed scaling governor from “ondemand” to “performance” there are no more glitches on the screen and so far (after 18h) no freezes either on my Ugoos.

In both my Armbian and Khadas images (which run stably) the setting for the governor has been “performance” (by default/install or by my choice, I don’t remember).

To be continued…

@JFL Yeah, I think we have come to understand now that every type of box needs a specific set of tweaks to get it to run well. Somewhat disappointing but also makes it more interesting, I guess.

How to you set governor to “performance” in Manjaro or In Armbian or Khadas? May be with performance it might improve my situation too.

Are you able to update Armbian to kernel 5.9.6 or higher from kernel 5.9.0? If yes, any guidance will be appreciated.

Tried this on my X96Max+ but system still gets unresponsive after a very short period of time when using panfrost and linux-vim kernel.

BTW, command to set speed governor to performance is:
sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

@JFL The governor is a built in feature of modern kernels and it can be accessed via various tools/programs, on Manjaro via cpupower (pacman -S cpupower). The options (some might not be available on your platform) can be seen (as root) by just doing cpupower or cpupower frequency-info. To set a governor, do like cpupower frequency-set -g performance. You can also edit a config file /etc/default/cpupower but I don’t know yet if this is sufficient to make settings persist over reboots.
@TheMojoMan Sorry, I just missed your reply (which made part of mine redundant).

Edit: To make the changes to /etc/default/cpupower persistent (and to have them applied at boot) you must set up the associated systemd service with systemctl enable cpupower --now

Edit2: The governor and its current setting can be read directly like so
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
and it can be set directly like so
echo performance >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

jfl@GTKPro ~]$ sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance
[sudo] password for jfl:
sudo: cpupower: command not found

I need to install either cpufreq or cpupower. Are the command the same?

The package cpupower is the one.

@TheMojoMan @JFL I’m not using Panfrost right now (I think; I’m using a vanilla install and haven’t added any mesa-git stuff or the like). I’m just going to watch how your endeavor progresses and then jump in later. :stuck_out_tongue: I can watch all movies (720p, h265) smoothly without avg. CPU load going above, say 35%, so I’m good for now.

Just curious to understand what “[Firmware Bug]: Kernel image misaligned at boot, please fix your bootloader!” what does this mean?

I notice the same in Armbian image.

Dmesg Output
[ 0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0000000000 [0x410fd034]
[ 0.000000] Linux version 5.9.9-2-MANJARO-ARM (builduser@on2-runner) (gcc (GCC) 10.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.35) #1 SMP Fri Nov 20 12:30:37 UTC 2020
[ 0.000000] Machine model: Beelink GT-King Pro
[ 0.000000] efi: UEFI not found.
[ 0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: Kernel image misaligned at boot, please fix your bootloader!
[ 0.000000] Reserved memory: created CMA memory pool at 0x00000000dd800000, size 256 MiB
[ 0.000000] OF: reserved mem: initialized node linux,cma, compatible id shared-dma-pool

A comment on the apparent fix for my Ugoos by setting governor to performance:

It is perhaps not surprising that there would be problems on Amlogic chips when the CPU frequency is allowed to vary (i.e. when using using the kernel DVFS functionality) since the hardware does not (at least for some chips) report back the correct frequency values to the kernel, as can be seen from e.g. these threads Armbian, Khadas and Khadas. (When using a fixed frequency it is trivial for the kernel to figure out which one it is, and quickly adjust accordingly, even if it would be reported incorrectly by hardware. If the frequency is switched this is harder, I guess.)

For now the tentaive fix/workaround seems to be working but I will run it for a few more days before actually calling it a fix. (I have run it on my hybrid Khadas-boot/Manjaro-root image for 24h without problems and have now switched to a very vanilla recent 100% Manjaro image which I will continue to use for my testing.)

Edit2: @JFL I have seen that error too, and I don’t know what it means (I would like to know also).

No need to worry about this, it is just a warning message.

Hi spikerguy thank you
I tried from the top link https://anonfiles.com/93M3Ucm0pe/Manjaro-ARM-xfce-vim3-20.11.img_xz
Is it the wrong link? I will wait for your image, it would be great to use dual boot in my s905x3 box.
Thanks for your time

@dante6913 Hi, I think that the link you posted goes to an image of mine, which is unofficial (so use at your own risk). I have put up also a newer image that I’m running now, see this post (with the same disclaimer).

Hi tripole
The issue that I have is that I couldn’t try it because I always get
" Temporarily Unavailable

The file you are looking for is temporarily unavailable due to maintenance!

Don’t worry! Check back later and it will be available again!"

I never used any Arch based distribution so every thing is a little confusing, but at same time I think that will be fun to get out from debian based distributions

The link in the newer post (in the message just above) worked for me, just now.

thanks tripole the one that you posted is working for me, now I’m downloading.
But is different from the one I tried
Manjaro-ARM-xfce-vim3-201117-3pole.img.xz - AnonFiles your link
https://anonfiles.com/93M3Ucm0pe/Manjaro-ARM-xfce-vim3-20.11.img_xz the one on the top post

Yes, they are different; the one you are downloading now (the one labeled …-3pole.img.xz, I hope) is a newer version. Both images are built with the official Manjaro ARM build environment (manjaro-arm-tools) according to this post (but, of course, by some random guy on the internet; me).

Lol,
Thanks, I will try it and I will come back with my feedback and doubts!

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OK first impressions with my X96 air s905x3
Installed and booted with the toothstick with meson-sm1-sei610.dtb. No ethernet and no sound. I enabled sound and network manager following tripole instructions.
Ethernet didn’t work so I tried with meson-g12a-sei510.dtb as said by TheMojoMan, but again after reboot still didn’t work. I remembered that with Balbes images we had to change meson-sm1-sei610.dtb to be able to use ethernet so I used the changed dtb “meson-sm1-sei610-ethfix.dtb”, the I was able to boot and the Ethernet worked.
The sound from the box didn’t work but I didn’t lose anytime with it, I used my fiio usb dac, that worked.
I enable ssh and I did a uname -a I got 5.9.0-2-MANJARO-ARM kernel. So for now I’m looking to update the kernel. So is possible to update the kernel?
Sorry for my English, is not my first language.

It is indeed possible to change kernel, I refer you to JFL and TheMoJoMan (in this thread and other threads on e.g. Panfrost), they have done a lot of experimenting. (I think also that TheMojoMan has similar hardware as you have, if I remember correctly.) As for the sound, yes this is tricky (fiddling with dtb to get the h/w properly detected) but I just noticed that the VIM3L h/w seems to be similar to your box, at least according to this link so perhaps you could try meson-sm1-khadas-vim3l.dtb ?

Edit: Of course, it is only reasonable to hope to get the digital sound working.