I agree with the last point… simply cause I had random reboots on OpenFyde and once I did that spi clean flash magic happened. Anyway Kaiser… u seem to be very critic on all these boards u give us good advices but… why are you so critic about them… whats the pinacle of these boards to you? the pi foundation? are them the mighty ones who know all and make all things right?
Coming from a Windows user and as U could see im no Linux expert and all I wanted was a portable ChromeOS device being this a possibility once maybe openfyde bring us android apps for me Im fine… because even with all its bugs and issues for armbian on an optic user base webapp style… Im good and happy.
Idk whats everyone usage for these little boards… But I believe this is recent tech with lot to improve and I believe we can see new surprises in the future so Im happy with it.
Edit: I dont agree with some youtubers reviews… they tend to focus on lame titles like ‘the pi killer’ big stupidity right there… and then they lose the fun of reveiling and reviewing a nice product to basically… kill it.
I’m really sorry I’ve made that last remark, I shouldn’t have said something like that, no need to repeat yourself twice. I have no idea what history you’ve got with the community, and who exactly you’re upset with the most (Rockchip/Radxa/Armbian/etc), and what exactly tipped you over the edge, but I’m sure your expertise could still help all of us a lot.
Again, I’m sorry for saying what I shouldn’t have.
If things you request can’t be addressed anytime soon, not withing this and next year, what do you expect? Who does like to generate or hear complains about all the time?
Perhaps you are been ignorant? I am sharing my private time every Wednesday to talk about anything regarding the project except complaining about technical issues. I am not working as a technical support and that is anyway done in public, answer can be provided by anyone. This is the deal we have with public: best effort support and you are the one that wants to rape that deal.
We mostly agree you are right in technical sense, yes, there are problems but project can only do what is possible. Just don’t make this another persons / projects problem. Sending a patch is already a problem as someone has focus into the work and review it.
No, we don’t do great engineering changes here. Nobody asked, nobody is paying for and nobody wants to invest time into the dead code. We are already generating too big loss, so making it bigger is not really smart. Perhaps this is why you have a feeling of being ignored, dear “customer”. Serving is limited and you can’t get all time slots there are.
Not everyone can do fancy YouTube or highly valuable QA testing with extreme tl;dr; and comparing what people you respect so little do for everyone. To generate one line fix, one can blow a week, while in that time you can easily generate 20 pages of technical documentation on testing and spam all forums with complains what doesn’t work and what you recommend to be fixed. Thank you, but most of problems are actually known, “just” time fixing them is a problem.
No matter how close to nothing we do, we invest 50-100 hours every day into open source. I know its not really much and certainly it looks nothing from your highly valuable position / perspective, but projects that invests 1% of our “nothing” into sales of out work, can easily looks to be on our level (some even convinced Radxa to pay them, while they paid us nothing). See, there are problems you simply ignore while accusing others of ignoring you. Just communicating with people (you would say idiots, because they are not on your technical level) to arrange things or to deal with internal technical issues I lost hours and hours every day. This is not possible to do alongside full time job.
You are right in technical sense - things are wrong and need fixing, but this require time / resource / interest. Even if all this matches, you can’t treat people like sh* and dictate people who are already working overtime on their day time jobs and private time to work more …
Just to clarify, by support I mean for now I think it would be good to have mainline support where the sd card, network and usb ports work, I mean this is the standard initial goal for any soc going mainline so it can basically be run as a headless server. Seems like it’s almost there just the pcie 2.0 isn’t working so I assume that means no ethernet and no usb. I’m not a developer so don’t really know but as an example I bought a couple of rk3328 based boards and I have gotten great use out of them (great for libreelec or openwrt) but sometimes do find it odd at how progress stalls or DTS files don’t get updated/fixed or drivers like the usb3 phy don’t get mainlined.
Heh I have a celeron tablet i’m compiling stuff on, and it only has 8GB of ram and for some reason compiling clang caused it to go completely out of memory and grind to a halt. So I ran nbdkit memory on the rock 5b and made a 10G ramdisk to use as swap and clang compiled no problems haha. I had a go seeing how it handled x86 emulation but it seems like it would take a while to figure out other than just booting an existing disk/distro with qemu but qemu might be too slow.
It would be interesting to have somewhere a summary of what works/what doesn’t work. I read the forum from time to time, and I confess I’m confused about the real state of the RockPi5, which I’m thinking of buying one day.
Well, I guess right now YMMV depending on what you what to get from this board.
The CPU is good, and having a real PCIe 3.0x4 might be a game changer if that’s what you’re after (e.g. for I/O-heavy tasks). As a headless server it’s quite a good one, in terms of performance per dollar, as well as performance per watt. With a Rock 5A or Orange Pi5, or anything else based on a RK3588S this applies too, except for the I/O part.
The GPU, on the other hand, is still waiting for the proper drivers, be it Panfrost or Mali, both are yet to deliver: it’s stuck at ~40% it’s potential, yet it can still deliver really good performance. Maybe in a a few months or years things will change, as it seems that Mali is finally releasing some proper Vulkan support for other chips, even if it’s closed-source; in the meantime, Mesa is working on its own PanVK which may take a while. So far, it’s a beast on a leash with a strict collar. It’s still good enough (as in, ~60fps) for GameCube/Dreamcast/Wii/PSP emulation, thanks to it’s sheer power, but it can do much better than that.
Speaking of graphics, you’ll really want to use Wayland and forget about X11, but I guess it’s a good thing anyway.
Mainline support is moving slowly (like, super-slowly), but that brings us back to the question of what you want to get out of that…
PD support is a real pain in the back, though can easily be solved with a dumb power supply.
Video encoding/decoding is a bit awkward at the moment, some things work nicely, e.g. you can actually get smooth 4K-8K HEVC/AV1 playback with HDR, but there’s a caveat of HDMI sound passthrough not quite being there for Linux in general, which is why I’m sticking with my Shield for media; otherwise, I’d probably switch in a heartbeat. Also, apparently GStreamer is the way, with FFMpeg being less of a priority (due to some licensing issues or something)…
NPU — can’t comment, haven’t tried. Once I get my hands on a 5A (btw, it’s “Rock 5”, not “Rock Pi 5”), I’ll probably try to bring up a Frigate server on that one.
Accessories aren’t there yet. There’s an acrylic open case (just two plain slabs), and a metal case that only supports passive cooling, plus some options for DIY 3D-printing, and that’s about it (KKSB is going to release a good metal case in 2-3 moths). Even the fan support is a bit awkward: despite having dedicated PWM pins on the board, you need a custom solution to make it work, e.g. a kernel modification that enables it, or a script/app from a third-party GitHub repo.
Speaking of accessories, WiFi/BT may give you a bit of a struggle. It works, mind you, but you may have to do a little dance to switch it on.
The bottom line is, pretty much all of the declared functionality is there (apart from Vulkan I’d say, though maybe it does work under Android; haven’t tried that one), but all of it has a huge “WIP” sign all over.
I’m personally happy with the board, as it does almost all I wanted it to do (except for the media part, I guess), but I still can’t shake off the feeling that it’s a powerful hardware being severely held back by the software part, and there’s no roadmap for when that’s going to be fixed.
Also, please treat this as my personal opinion (that of a non-educated casual user), as some more experienced folks may have their own strong one about some of the points.
Nah im just joking Im in the same page. 