A20 on Micro board: sluggish performance, buggy HDMI/display, crash on poweroff

[dry]

Hello,

I just got myself the Olinuxino-MICRO board with A20.  This is dual core A7, at 1Ghz, per doc.

I've booted it using default Olimex released image, and, my initial impression its sluggish.. I don't feel like its running dual core A7 at 1Gz.

I'm not sure if its the GUI/ Windows manager and the buggy HDMI/display driver, or something else.  Why I say its buggy HDMI:  after connecting display to it, the default XFCE4 starts and, initially looks all good, but as soon as I start moving anything, or opening windows, or running apps that refresh screen, or using menus, ( the whole screen starts flickering  like old CRT monitor which is about to go caput.   This is same monitor i have connected to my laptop, so I'm pretty sure nothing wrong with it as I just switch the input channel..)

So its flickering, drawing lines, making me think either very bad buggy driver or failing controller, or ....

So that is that, not sure if the whole Wm/GUI stuff eats up performance - I haven't looked in detail at top, htop..(and not sure that will help).

I tried also set "performance" mode into cpu freq/scaling manager though sysfs, I did not get any noticeable performance bump.

And finally, on poweroff, the system  /kernel crashed or ooops'ed..

So, are these Chinese A20's just underperforming..?  I sort of, cannot match performance of an iMX6 I experienced with dual A7 (or was it even A5 that I was using)  to this A20 SoC.

[LubOlimex]

The kernel crash on power off is known. I can confirm that. It is on our TODO list but it is low priority.

About the HDMI, can you repeat your tests when HDMI monitor is connected before applying power. Also maybe after power up open a console and run "olinuxino-display" and select HDMI output.

> So, are these Chinese A20's just underperforming..?  I sort of, cannot match performance of an iMX6 I experienced with dual A7 (or was it even A5 that I was using)  to this A20 SoC.

There is no hardware acceleration enabled, maybe that is the culprit. If you need it for more video or GUI intensive tasks, maybe try the older legacy sunxi images or LibreElec images that have acceleration. In the FTP folders here:

https://ftp.olimex.com/Allwinner_Images/A20-OLinuXino/

Refer to the Olimage guide for more info:

https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/blob/master/DOCUMENTS/OLIMAGE/Olimage-guide.pdf

Which iMX6 board exactly do you compare it with?