I'm running Armbian from a emmc 16GB card. When I use the web browser the mouse constantly flickers, is there any way to get this to stop? Is there a graphics driver I should have enabled? When I select Additional Hardware Drivers none show up, so maybe there isnt a GPU accelerated driver available. Also switching between desktops feels sluggish. Maybe Im expecting too much performance from a $50 SBC.

 

Thanks for your help & time in making this distribution. Im just looking to make the best user experience possible.

Armbian uses the mainline kernel and open drivers....  Amlogic has some issues with accelerated desktop... especially with GPU... search the forum and you should find some workarounds for other amlogic boards such as Odroidn2 and Khadas Vim3

 

If its available you can try the "legacy" kernel via armbian config.... or you might just have to use odroid's image... hope this is helpful.

Is there any way to install panfrost, the open source mali GPU driver?

45 minutes ago, meadrocks said:

Is there any way to install panfrost, the open source mali GPU driver?

Exactly that one has issues, which is why we simply disable it. This way you can at least use it to some degree.
 

According to this video, 

 

It seems to be working.

22 minutes ago, meadrocks said:

It seems to be working.

 

Then it might be easy to integrate - choose 3D support in application menu. Start here: https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Build-Preparation/

 

If it won't work as expected, check logs, consult with authors of 3D engine. Hardkernel builds might be using dirty hack in their builds ...

Does panfrost do anything for 2D, drawing windows, moving them around the desktop, mouse flicker? 

@meadrocks - in xorg something called glamor is used to do acceleration of things you mentioned and glamor is using the opengl functionality of mesa - you can see something like "glamor initialized" in the xorg logs if it was properly enabled

 

best wishes - hexdump

 

ps: in case you want to look deeper into this, then having a look at the following links might be interesting

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=335755&sid=636e08b7c2fd692b0b6a81dbc318741f#p335755

https://github.com/tobetter/linux/commit/a026e2e9f55116e81ed49f48d918fdb91e28eff6

not sure if this will work on the c4 too ...