Nano Pi T4

[Brian Beuken]

I'm in love

Its been a long time since I could get a board, burn linux on it and immediately use it.
The T4 is such a board, it came with android installed, but I wanted Lubuntu, and hoped I could dual boot it from an SD, but that didn't work out, so I reflashed the eMMC with Lubuntu, very very simple

And wow, it works, its all there, GLMark2-es2 works fine, though it is frame locked so never went above 50fps, not to worry running it offscreen (avoiding the frame lock) throws up a mark of 312, that's 3 times faster than a raspberry   And.....and.....OpenGLES3.2 yipeee


There's a small downside though, its froze on a 2nd turn of glmark2, it clearly got very hot even with the heat sink on board.. So it is a little fussy. Usually updates fix that, but I can' t get apt-get update to work
It says the dirs are locked....hmmm dunno how to fix that, so have posted on the forums.


I'm loving this board already... going to do a quick compare with the XU4 and Tinkerboard (after an update) to see how its glmarks compare. I'll set up a test project shortly to see how the standard demo plays. Its got a Mali 860Mp4 in there so its up there with the latest (in terms of SBC's, 5 years behind phones though) and has a nice bit of grunt, if we can control the overheat, it could be a contender.

Tinkerboard returns GLMark2-es2 score of 392...hmm that's surprising, and impressive, but the Tinkerboard only goes to OpenGLES3.1 
I'll add the XU4 here when I get round to hooking it up again.

[Brian Beuken]

hmm just like the Xu4, I am having problems getting an X11 window to open, the latest Ubuntu seems to have some issues I don't know about... this will require some research, so for now the maze demo's on Ubuntu systems are on hold

[Brian Beuken]

aww bugger before I could try things out with the xhost + fix, the T4 asked me if it wanted to update to a new OS, I said yes, and 3 days later (it kept stopping after hours waiting for keys when I wasn't there) it finished but reported many errors, mainly related to installing keys and x11..

So update is incomplete and the net result is I can't build at all...and I can't run a load of other features, or apt-get update/upgrade the unit..so it needs to be reflashed.

I've totally forgotton how I flashed it the 1st time ok well..

[Brian Beuken]

hmm tits, the update process always causes some form of error.
And for some reason, currently unknown I can't seem to get the test program to build, it complains of not finding X11, but it is quite clearly there....odd.


back in the drawer for a while

[Brian Beuken]

Ok finally got the updates working.
needed to install the dev version of X11 which wasn't installed
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev

Really amazing beast of a machine in terms of processing power, I'm on the fence on GPU though, its running quite slow and has a few glitches, in a window, it may however be bad drivers I'll keep my eyes open. One sure sign of drivers not being up to speed is when you run GLMark2-es2 and the test with and without VBO's give the same result.. A hardware VBO based system should get at least 10-20% increased speed, often much more when done properly. So a same mark means its "probably" emulated. GLXinfo does however say its accelereated, so I dunno... for sure a VBO draw is much faster than a non vbo draw so I remain confused.

Even so this runs 30fps...if thats all done with emulation thats impressive.. When better drivers do come on line though...ouch momma!


I'm going to try a few specific openGL3.2 things and get an idea of what it can do.

[Brian Beuken]

Friendly Arm have been busy with their RK3399 designs, the M4 is basically the T4 with less connections at haf the price, which is very impressive, but look at this puppy.
The Nano NEO4...
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?ro...uct_id=241

Now that's what I want to see, the price is good, a network and usb 2/3 ports mean its got all I need, and then that RK3399 with an Mali864 on it......if it matches the T4 in performance (and it should) this will be the a really amazing board.

fingers crossed, I've asked Friendly arm if I can one, we'll see.