Orange Pi One Plus

[Brian Beuken]

This has been in the drawer for some time, but its time to look at it again as its one of the 1st H6 boards which become available and of course H6 means we have OpenGLES3.0+ possibilities..

Basically a chip replacement for the small form OrangePi One which has an H3, this big brother has 1GB of ram and that H6 with a T720 "multi" core GPU, no idea how many cores, but we've done nice things with dual cores, so lets assume that. Not sure its still currently in production but you can pick it up very cheap ~$20 from AliExpress which is OrangePi's main outlet.
I've been quite harsh on OrangePi's support in the past but even though its still hard to get what you want it does look like they are making a bit more effort, their site is quite well organised now and they do seem to be keeping a decent number of OS's on tap in an easy to find format. It also gives you an insight into just how many of these boards they churn out. 
22 different boards are currently listed... Not all are in still in production though (I assume) but its quite a wide range and they are cheap.


Debian Jessie is available, so I'll install that, and get back to you when I've had a chance to try it out this weekend.

[Brian Beuken]

meh, can't get it to boot..back in the drawer

[Brian Beuken]

oops...I was trying to boot an Opi One (h3) with an OpiOnePlus (h6) image ...

proper board now set up and trying it out.

No drivers, no build essentials, no gles, so...lots to set up...probably only going to get a software render.

[Brian Beuken]

oh no... no, this is not a good waste of my time. In spite of my very real desire to get to the GPU its not really viable, this thing is slower than a turtle swimming through treacle...its painful how long it takes to install stuff, and even more painful to see how long it takes to compile test projects....I could probably get this up and running, but I doubt I'd get anywhere.

Soooo Slow...

Well I hit a roadblock, I can't get it to provide and EGL context to render to, so its all stop, but even if I could the CPU is so slow I doubt it can actually handle the main body of code.. I might try an unbuntu build and see if thats any better, but todays fun and games with this board are over.

[Brian Beuken]

and in a final twist, I did a dist-upgrade, which took the best part of 9 hours....and then nothing would compile......back in the drawer

[Brian Beuken]

I tried again with Ubuntu this time as I really want to see if I can get an H6 system up and running as they represent the next generation of low cost CPU's to compete with the RockChips.
After double checking to see if a new Debian was available, it wasn't; I burned an SD with Ubuntu 16.04 and aside from having to manually resize the SD partitions it worked fine

Well its certainly a lot faster than the Debian version for sure, It looks like the quad cores are actually running and it does have GLMark2-es2 on board, but its all emulation I'm afraid. The Mali T720 isn't accessible leaving Mesa to do a lot of emulating and running GLMark2 to a score of....46

Update and upgrade and dist-upgrade followed and a re-test gave us... 44 (29 on screen)

yeah, not going to be usable as a graphic system for a while Armbian is still at core use stage so no graphics.

The H6 has some promise in cheaper systems, with OpenGLES3.1 available, but not for a while and probably not till someone other than OrangePi makes them as they really don't spend much time on their software.

[Brian Beuken]

give it its due though, it did manage to run the Maze demo, though only at 6fps

[Brian Beuken]

Tried again with Ubuntu desktop using linux 4.9 (I think thats ubuntu 18).....its just not performing, still seems to only have one core in operation, so whatever the issue is its low down in the kernal, I left it overnight to update...and came back to it the next day hoping to see a significant improvement, but its still slower than a ZXSpectrum.

Painful to see a promising low cost, high performance chip with a really nice 3.0 capable GPU, utterly ruined by useless software.This could have been an absolute winner with a $20 price and considerably more power than an RPi3B, but...1 core, running like treacle and no GPU makes it a non starter

Final try, using Armbian, which I always like to work with for non graphic systems, and it seems a lot quicker, on the updates/upgrades, but no graphic interface, however it is nippy and al cores seem to be running fine when I installed and built GLMark2-es2, but of course when I ran it, it wasn't able to create a canvas, so it didn't run...The older Ubuntu build is still the only one that even try's to produce a graphic system but no acceleration.

Really pissed with Orange for releasing this, potentially awesome board with no basically no functioning graphic systems.