A20 Lime2 Rev.L : EMMC somewhat slow: 8 min 10 sec to install 3 GB? 35 sec boot?

[att2]

Hello,
We have the following configuration:
Hardware: T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-e8Gs16M-IND rev.L
Lot code: P15389
We installed Ubuntu 20 focal from images.olimex.com, 652 MB size, finally, sucessfully.
Just after installation the whole installation is around 2.8 GB in size, on the sd card.
What we noticed is that booting is noticably slower than what we were used as a normal boot time since the old Kernel 3.4 and revision K of Lime2.
Thus, we installed it to EMMC with the proper olinuxino-... command as described in the latest documents.
The first unusual thing we noticed is that it takes 8 minutes and 10 seconds to get about 3 GB of data to EMMC. This is unusually slow for emmc!
The next thing we noticed, when we booted from EMMC, is, that it boots sloooow. It takes around 35 seconds until everything is ready.
Why is your emmc so slow ? I am not even saying anything against the strange metric of the install routine, that it jumps from 99% install backwards, then the percentage jumps up again, and stays very long at 99%.......

I need faster boot, faster operation, more tiny OS but including XFCE! (Thanks for your understanding!    )

[LubOlimex]

Try the minimal images instead. They have less packages installed and will load faster. Also make sure to compare the boot time from SD card and from eMMC.

[att2]

Then, let me ask you this, up-front: Do you think that writing to EMMC with an average speed of 6.1 MB/sec is considered normal?
If someone sells me a SD-card or a USB-Stick that is as slow as that when writing to it, I would not hesitate to throw this trash away!

In general, the Lime2-Rev L seems to be very slow.
We just tried to play a video - a normal mp4 file - via VLC and what we get are some lousy 3 to 5 frames a second!

What is going on? How can I speed up this machine ?

[LubOlimex]

I recommend you to start from this document:

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

It is recommended to use either older sunxi images (kernel 3.4.x) or KODI images if you wish to use the boards as video players. The reason is that the video accelerated driver contains binary blobs which are not accepted in mainline kernel.