Progress on Manjaro ARM stability on the pi 4?

ARM Technical Assistance
#1

Hey guys just wanted to ask how the progress on the stability on the ARM version of Manjaro is going or how the progress is going on fixing the random freezing when in use is going.

I am using Manjaro on my raspberry pi and since it’s release with xfce being a big performance issue in and going from my custom openbox setup to Mate being the most stable I still experience random freezing when in use unlike Rasperry PI OS which doesn’t have this issue. I really enjoy and much rather use Manjaro for it’s full 64 bit OS out of the box, better package management, graphical tools and software available giving users a consistent experience from their PC’s to their single board computers so I really hope these issues do get addressed because I am a big Manjaro fan and solely use it as my OS of choice. :slight_smile:

Keep up the good work team! :smiley:

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#2

Just out of curiosity - do you run from SD card or USB?

In case of USB - is it some kind of enclosure with a ‘real’ disk device or a USB stick?

I have been considering - when I get the time - right now, I have very little - applying some of the Manjaro Openbox configuration to my Pi.

#3

Good question. I have run on usb stick and now on a usb M.2. In both cases I had to extend my usb drive with a usb cable to prevent freezing. My usb stick the usb cable was 6" but had to go with a 12" usb cable for my M.2 drive. In case of the M.2 I have my pi on top of my computer and the usb drive hanging down the metal side of my desktop computer to keep it so it was not in line of sight of the pi.

#4

My experience is the issue is with the use of the VC video drivers. I switched to using fbdev and all is good. I run xfce4 with the compositor active on a RPi4 8GB booting on a USB SSD with wifi and have no performance/stability issues. Even with an SD card, so long as I use the fbdev drivers, all is good.

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#5

The performance difference between running from SD vs. USB stick vs. USB SSD is something not mentioned very often.

I knew from previous experiments - I have used the rpi since it’s initial release - the performance gain - switching to USB. I have tested - almost - every rpi board release ( except the A versions) and there is a distinct difference.

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#6

Agreed. I still maintain my original pi1here just for nostalgia. The faster the media used with read/writes the faster the whole system is. Slower speeds creates bottle necks. Even some sdcards are pretty much useless.

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#7

I have found that a fresh wipe with manjaro-arm-flash or whatever that tool is called has helped speed things up, as my old install was getting a bit sluggish even after being overclocked. also I’m still waiting for hardware acceleration on 64 bit from the pi people but they don’t seem to be that interested at the moment.

#8

Be aware though, that fbturbo/fbdev does not do 3d acceleration at all. So while it’s better in XFCE, it will be a lot worse in Plasma (which makes heavy use of 3d effects).

#9

I run from a SD card but from testing these little freezes don’t happen on Raspberry pi OS or based on distros unlike Manjaro Arm on the pi 4 and I really hope these issues get fixed because Manjaro on Arm is so awesome

#10

I really hope the next PI has a sata and m.2 support on the board as well as a far better CPU and GPU (especially the gpu) as while it can do a lot it is quite lacking.

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#11

Did anyone figure out the cause of the random freezing? it really can ruin the desktop experience, either certain applications will freeze for a short time than respond or the whole desktop will freeze up for a short time as well as it taking a little bit for even openbox to properly startup without stuttering and mini freezes and I’m not even using a compositor.

#12

I have yet to experience random freezing but it sure is an issue I must avoid. I use Xfce4 on both SSD and SD. What makes your setup unique? I see you run Openbox, do you start with Manjaro Architect and then add Openbox or do you start with the Openbox Community Edition? Does this random freeze occur with the LXDE Community Edition? I assume it is closest to the RPi OS setup.

#13

I started off with the xfce image for my pi 4 but I was having the random freezes and the main issue being the compositor issues but yeah I know you can turn off off but I really wish it worked properly on the raspberry pi 4 so I removed xfce DE off it and installed openbox and a Samsung Evo 64gb SD card, that’s really about it

#14

Overclocking? I have one PI4 that does not tolerate overclocking, it hangs at random spots in the boot process. Others I can overclock to 2.1GHz and 750MHz without any issues.

#15

Hmm that’s odd how they all act differently when they should all act the same…

I have mine overclocked to 2ghz and 750mhz on the gpu because anything above 2ghz on the cpu would be unstable and would have issues simular to what you were saying when booting if I am remembering correctly

#16

Currently, 2.147GHz is the highest supported CPU clock rate, recently raised from 2.0GHz with the latest firmware. Every board is unique, as each chip on a board has its own weaknesses/flaws. So as they say, your mileage may vary, when it comes to overclocking.

#17

Don’t really thinks so because I’ve debunked this by the fact that manjaro ARM using xfce is still really slow and unresponsive or having freezing issues and even with a different de or wm like open box it does it it but far less. Openbox and mate showed to be the most stable and suffered the least from this from testing, meanwhile raspberry pi OS with its own desktop and Ubuntu 20.10 using gnome on the exact duplicate Samsung Evo SD was very stable and only had one minor freeze/stutter on Ubuntu but was stable and usable.

There is a lot of things Manjaro need to fix to give a working and stable experience on Raspberry pi’s and need to take notes from other distros to fix these issues.

#18

I have no freezing on any DE I have tried but I normally use xfce on a sdcard and usb boot drive. Mine is overclocked to 2000 and I have no gpu overclocking as a lot of posts are out there saying that it is not much benificial.

As stated above not all pi’s are equal with overclocking. Some say it is because they are assembled all over the world and use different chips from their suppliers.

Too much overclocking can cause freezing.