[OS] Debian Bullseye for Exynos4 boards

[meveric]

This is my version of Debian Bullseye (11) for the Exynos 4 boards ODROID U2/U3, X, X2

It uses Kernel 5.19.10 at the moment, but will get updates as usual from my repository.

It's a headless server image only with user root. But it has all my repositories included, which allows for easy installation and updates of packages such as Kernel and Headers and other packages.

The image has my usual setup: means on first boot it's resizing the rootfs partition and configures SSH. It will automatically reboot after the initial setup after which this image is ready to use.
Kernel and headers are already installed if you need to build your own drivers.
A few basic tools such as htop, mc, vim and bash-completion are already installed for your convenience.

Download: Debian-Bullseye md5 sha512 sig

Size compressed: 149MiB
Size uncompressed: 1.3GiB

Default Login: root
Default Password: odroid

It's ready to be used as a server image.

Features:

• Debian Bullseye (11) debootstrap image (minimal OS)
• u-boot 2020-10
• upstream Kernel (5.19.10)
• ext4 partitions for both bootfs and rootfs
• unified flash-kernel config (should be fitting for all ODROID armhf boards)
• uses opensource drivers for GPU (Lima)
• OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Mali 400 GPU via Lima
  

First things first:
Since there's constantly new development for this image and ODROIDs in general the First thing you should do after the image is up and running is to install all updates:

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apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade

How to convert the image into a Desktop image:
The image can easily converted into a Desktop image looking similar to this:


I created a setup tool that's already preinstalled:

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setup-odroid

Which should easily allow you to install a Desktop Environment.

Wayland desktop is also supported:


Hints:
Changing language:
If you install a Desktop environment you should already have keybord-configuration installed, it will ask upon the first installation what keyboard layout it should use.
This configuration is for your X11 Desktop so you have your desired keyboard layout.
For console you need to install console-setup to do the same, so just in case:

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apt install console-setup keyboard-configuration
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

should be all that is needed to change your keyboard layout.
You probably want to set timezone as well

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dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Setting up WLAN from command line:
Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces or create a new one under /etc/network/interfaces.d/ and add the following lines

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auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-essid <NAME-OF-YOUR-WLAN>
    wpa-psk <WLAN-PASSWORD>

If you're using a "hidden" network, please also add wpa-scan-ssid 1

Webbrowser:
Chromium and Firefox work fine, Chromium can be started with --use-gl=egl flag to run with WebGL hardware acceleration.
Although WebGL is supported, the Mali 400 GPU is very limited and results are not that great.
It works fine for hardware accelerated browsing (smoother scrolling of web-pages) but WebGL applications like WebGL Aquarium (although working) are very slow.
Same goes for YouTube, the performance is very bad and I would suggest using external player (for example mpv) to run YouTube videos.

Video Playback
While Kodi can be installed and runs both from X11 desktop as well as directly from terminal (GBM). It does not support hardware accelerated video playback.
If you install a desktop via setup-odroid I opted for installing mpv as a video player. It currently does not support hardware acceleration, but the CPU is fast enough to support 720p or even 1080p H264 content software decoded.
Maybe in future hardware accelerated video decoding will work again as it technically is included in the Kernel and applications, but currently doesn't work.

Known Issues:
Exynos 4 boards are by now quite old an lack some of the features modern OS expect from GPUs and CPUs, therefore your experience is somewhat limited.

Desktop performance:
I mainly use MATE desktop which works fine is low on resources but still pleasing to the eye and has many features of modern desktops.
While it works fine on the Exynos 4 boards, I noticed that using software composing (used for transparent effects and smoother window scrolling) can have a negative impact on the overall GPU performance.
While on other boards software compositing has no affect on the GPU performance on Exynos 4 boards it reduces GPU performance up to 50%.
So if you run applications that require a lot of GPU performance, best to disable software compositing

Wayland:
Wayland runs ok, I'm not a big fan, but if you want to use it that's fine.
Please be aware, MOST Linux application are still written for X11 and Wayland uses XWalyand to run X11 applications on Wayland.
This will also cause a huge performance hit, as the Wayland Desktop runs completely on the GPU and running an XWayland server within Wayland therefor runs with reduced overall GPU performance.
So while Gnome itself may run fine, and the few Wayland capable application out there also run ok, some application that are written for X11, may run worse under Wayland than when using an X11 Desktop instead.

No Output on TV or Monitor:
While the ODROID U3 seems to work out of the box, I had some issues with my ODROID X2, where it would not output anything on the TV.
Apparently the EDID is not always working on the X2. A workaround for this is to use the config.ini on the bootfs to configure a fixed screen resolution.
I had best experience with videoconfig="drm.edid_firmware=edid/1920x1080.bin"

Please Note: the image requires a newer version of u-boot!
This means while you can flash the image on an SD card and it will work out of the box, for eMMC the image only works if you perform an eMMC recovery process that flashes the newer u-boot from Debian repository.
I haven't tested this yet, so I suggest using SD card for the meantime.

As usual feedback is welcome.

[anatife]

I was away for a long while, but I'm glad to be back! ^_^

And what do I find? The excellent Meveric has made a Debian 11 image for our Odroid U3 SOCs!

The image is running perfectly. I am using LXDE and a portable external monitor.

One comment for the instructions:

Since this image uses the "root" account, one of the first things to do is to create a non-root user.

(as root) apt install sudo
(as root) adduser myUserName
(as root) usermod -aG sudo myUserName

Before you exit the root account to sign in as "myUserName", change the root account's password.

(as root) passwd

[meveric]

Hi anatife,
if you're using my setup-odroid tool there is an option to create a new user, an if you install a desktop via setup-odroid at the end it will actually suggest that you should a create a new user and guide you through the process.
I actually suggest using setup-odroid to install a desktop as it will install newer GPU drivers, mpv as a video player and some other things

[treobrian]

I would really like to try this as a server on my U3 but it does not boot on mine.

I downloaded the compressed image and checked the checksum file, all good.
I flashed the image with balenaEtcher, flashed and confirmed good.
Put the sdcard in the U3, plug in, red and blue led light up, blue stays solid for about 4 seconds and then flashes once, goes out. Left for a few minutes but does not start again.

I tried both a 16 Gb sdcard and a 2 Gb card. The result was the same with each.

I don't have a uart. I guess that with one flash only, there will be no log files updated on the card?

I don't have an HDMI cable attached. the network cable is the only attachment.

The U3 runs fine with Ubuntu 16.04 so I guess the U3 is not the problem?

Any ideas?

[meveric]

I just tried the image on my side and I could not recreate the error you described.

The first flash of the blue LED for me is roughly 4 seconds into the boot for me, it's about the time it starts to check USB devices or might even slightly later when it checks the rootfs.

I know that the old ODROIDs where a bit picky with the SD cards, that not all were working correctly San Disk Ultra (not Extreme) are known to work fine.
I tested with one of the San Disk Industrial from HardKernel itself, they work fine as well.

Since I normally clean the image, before uploading them, you should easily be able to identify if the boot process did write some log, else the log should be completely empty.

For now I would suggest flash the image again.

If you have a Linux system you can use the command:

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xzcat Debian-Bullseye-1.0-20221017-Exynos4.img.xz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M conv=notrunc,fsync status=progress

to flash the image, you might have to replace /dev/mmcblk0 with whatever device you have that is your SD card
I have a build in SD card reader so it's /dev/mmcblk devices same as with ODROIDs themselves, but it might be /dev/sdb or something similar for you if you have an USB SD card reader

[treobrian]

Thanks Meveric,

I will try your suggestion. My sdcard is Lexer 633x 16 GB microsd HC I.
I also have a San Disk Ultra that I use along with my emmc in Ubuntu 16.04, so I could give that guy a try. It seems to work very well as storage.

Interestingly, your Jessie image boots fine with the same sdcard, but I could not do any updates there do to the key files being expired. I thought to try upgrading from there to newer Debians but no luck with that.

I then tried a bullseye and also a jammy image from hexdump0815 but they bot behaved the same as your bullseye image. Just the one flash of the blue.

I'm using the power supply I got from Hardkernel with the U3. It is now quite old. Would the newer images draw more power?

Thanks again, I will update you with progress.

[meveric]

as long as the adapter still provides 5V it should be fine.. since you're not having USB Harddrives connected, or using heavy CPU + GPU load, the power draw should be rather limited.

I personally also have very good results with San Disk Ultra.. so I expect them to work.. if not then maybe something else is not ok.

[treobrian]

The San Disk Ultra had the same result, one blue flash then nothing. I used your zxcat/dd command to flash it rather than my usual balenaEtcher.
It's a mystery why your Jessie was fine but nothing else works and both sdcards seem to work well for storage. Maybe there is a problem with the sdcard connector on the U3 but I really haven't swapped them in and out much, using the emmc for images.

Meanwhile my emmc based Ubuntu 16.04 is ticking along nicely and I have it locked down as well as I can figure out using clamscan, fail2ban, ufw and keyed ssh logins.

I couldn't find anything between Jessie and Bullseye for the U3 in your repository, is that correct?

Thanks Meveric, I appreciate your help.

[meveric]

I do have repositories between Jessie and Bullseye but for the U3 no other images, as back thin with the old Kernel the OS is not "fully" supported and throws Kernel errors due to too old Kernel version.

I'd still love to know what the problem is. Maybe it is the power supply, too bad you don't have an UART.. would love to know what the image does before it goes off.

[sirzur]

I have successfully installed this on my Odroid U3 and booted up fine. I have also successfully installed the MATE desktop, set timezone. However I have NOT been successful to mount a NTFS USB drive.

The ntfs-3g package seems to be installed as part of the package, but fuse module appears to be missing from the kernels. The error message that I get from daemon.log is "ntfs-3g-mount: fuse device is missing, try 'modprobe fuse' as root". Modprobe fuse gives me error "FATAL: Module fuse not found in directory /lib/modules/6.17-armmp-lpae"


I note that the kernels have been automatically upgraded to 6.1.7. Is there any way to incorporate fuse in Kernel to allow NTFS drives to be mounted? Is there a procedure to compile the relevant kernel?

[meveric]

I'll add the missing module to my next kernel build.

[sirzur]

Thanks. Appreciate the hard work you put in to make these older boards still relevant

From what I can see of your repo, it looks as if the XU4 and U3 share the same Kernel. I hope that is the case because I also have a XU4 board that I intend to load Debian on at some stage. If not, can I also request that the kernels you build for XU4 also include the fuse module

Thanks again

[meveric]

they use the same Kernel, no worry

[sirzur]

Thanks for the information. By the way, just to prepare for the new kernel, when the next kernel becomes available, how do I update the kernel, or rather which one of the three options below is best to update the kernel

1. apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade

2. apt-get install linux-headers-armhf-odroid-u
apt-get install linux-image-armhf-odroid-u

3. apt-get install linux-headers-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos
apt-get install linux-image-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos

Or some other option. Again, thanks for your help

[meveric]

I normally use the following set of commands:

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apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade && apt autoremove && apt clean && apt update

You should not use linux-image-armhf-odroid-u as it will install an older version of the Kernel and will probably not work at all.
linux-image-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos is for 6.1 LTS version, if you want to switch from always newest to 6.1 and stay with Kernel 6.1 even when 6.2 or higher is out, then you can switch to the LTS release by installing linux-image-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos and linux-headers-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos instead.


Anyway new Kernel is live and you can update.

[sirzur]

Thanks for the upgraded kernel. The fuse module did the trick and I can now mount USB drives.

From your notes, I see that MGLRU is now activated. The reason I switched from Ubuntu to Debian was because Ubuntu from hexdump's imagebuilder and Kernel was unstable with OOM kills happening all the time and out of the blue as well. Keeping a process alive by adjusting OOM score just shifts the problem to another process. Eventually I just had to reboot a couple of days, plus I had a couple of disk corruptions along the way. In any case, according to hexdump (https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/issues/73),

"the cause of the oom kills was (those were oom kills from the kernel and not via ubuntu systemd oom stuff): the zswap pool paramater needs to be changed from z3fold to zsmalloc as zbud and z3fold can only allocate from normal memory and not from himem and normal mem on the odroid u3 is only about 700mb - due to this the system ran out of memory in this region and the oom killer kicked in"

I tried his suggestion but the OOM kills are still a problem. So I am trying a different OS now. I don't know much about Debian/ Ubuntu, but is there likely to be the same issue with this Debian OS / Kernel combo?

[meveric]

MGLRU was requested in another section of the forum, as it was specifically designed for devices with little RAM like ARM boards and is suppose to free unused pages faster than normally which in return allows for better memory handling.
That's how I understood it, still I only made the module available who ever wants to use it still needs to configure it, means that it should not interfere by default.

I personally prefer the use of zram and provide zram-odroid as a package as an easy script to handle zram.

If you application run out of memory the OOM will kill the application it sees fit to prevent the system from crashing. SWAP (any type of swap) is meant as a last resort mechanism to prevent applications from being killed by OOM by moving unused pages from memory in swap to free RAM.

In the past swap was on harddrives which are very slow compared to memory, and especially when using flash based storage such as SD cards, it will wear the flash storage quickly.

ZRAM compresses data in memory meaning it will take the pages that are currently not needed compresses them and puts it in a section of the memory, you loose some memory in which the zram is located, but thanks to the compression the amount of data that can be held in this compressed memory is much higher than the data it actually uses in memory. Often by a factor between 3-6 times.
Meaning, If you have 600MB of data in physical memory that is currently not needed, zram can compress this (for example by factor 3:1) and put it into swap this means it now only occupies 200MB in memory and you gained 400MB of free memory.
As with regular swap it will read and write to the "virtual swap" and store and load pages from and to memory.
It costs some extra CPU time, but unless the system is already at it's limit it shouldn't be noteworthy.

ZSWAP works similarly but is a bit more advanced it does also the in memory compression but can also swap on slower harddrive if required, the size and amount of compressed memory it uses is dynamic and can increase or shrink depending on the current requirement, overall it's probably more advanced and has better features, but I assume it is also more complicated and writing the harddrive can still wear your SD cards a lot faster.

Overall while ZWAP is probably better, I still prefer using zram it seems a bit more mature and I rarely had any issues with it.
I don't have much experience with ZSWAP so it could be better, but I can't say it is.

Overall if your application is constantly swapping your device was not designed for it, or you did not configure your applications correctly.
rtorrent might be an alternative it runs without graphical interface and could save some precious resources.
Some clients are also java based for example and could be configured to limit memory usage.

[sirzur]

Thanks for your explanation on the differences between zram amd zswap.

I have gone to using a non gui of the two torrent clients - transmission-daemon (built from nightly) and qbittorrent-nox. In fact i am also experimenting with just booting up to console and running either of the torrent clients. After all, i run the U3 headless all the time after setup, so i dont really need the desktop.

Thanka for your help and quick compile of the kernel with fuse integrated

[tve]

Re: "Please Note: the image requires a newer version of u-boot!"

I have a U3 with U-Boot 2018.05, is that recent enough to theoretically work? If not, do you have a link for a newer version? Have you tested with EMMC or is it theoretical?

Thanks a TON for your work!!!

[tve]

To answer my own question:
- flash a sdcard with meveric's image, boot, log in
- make emmc boot sector writable: echo 0 > /sys/block/mmcblk1boot0/force_ro
- copy u-boot from sdcard to emmc (took 86sec!): dd iflag=dsync oflag=dsync if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=512 count=1300 skip=1 of=/dev/mmcblk1boot0
- flash meveric's image onto emmc, from my linux laptop: 7z x -so Debian-Bullseye-1.0-20221017-Exynos4.img.xz | ssh root@192.168.0.220 'dd bs=10M of=/dev/mmcblk1'
- pull power, pull sdcard, apply power
- verify that the serial boot console says: U-Boot 2020.10+dfsg-1 (Oct 05 2020 - 19:13:28 +0000)
- and: Linux version 5.19.10-armmp-lpae
- pour a beer and sip while watching setup-odroid and apt upgrade...

[tve]

I just looked back: I bought this puppy in 2014! 9 years later and it runs a current kernel and distro, pretty darn amazing!!!
(And still appears quite zippy, although I wonder whether my old 8GB EMMC is actually faster than a modern SDcard.)

[meveric]

over time SD cards wear alot, unless you have an industrial grade SD card, so I'm sure the eMMC is still faster.
Also the SD card was limited to 12 or 15 MB/sec for whatever reason, so even USB can be faster than a SD card on the older Exynos4 boards.

The u-boot itself can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=45450 (images are identical between X,X2,U2,U3, technically even the XU3/XU4 series but with different u-boot).
haven't copied it to all topics yet, but it's the default u-boot from Debian... you just need the signing tools from HardKernel.

[prahal]

MIght be on topic. I asked for the removal of armmp-lpae from flash-kernel db for Odroid U3 per it is a Cortex A9 and Cortex A9 is supposed not to support LPAE ( https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team ... equests/47 see https://github.com/lgeek/arm_tlb_huge_pages listing and https://developer.arm.com/documentation ... entellonly listing Cortex A7, A12 and A15 at that time in the v7-A architectures that support LPAE..)

I see you tell to install linux-image-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos which should be lpae enable per the name. Here I am not able to boot the Debian armmp-lpae kernel (tried 5.10 and 6.1) but I can boot Debian armmp kernel (same version). I only have "Starting kernel" then hang with the LPAE ones. This is an Odroid U2 board.
Note I have not tested your image. Though I see that you use debian flash-kernel so my commit might break your setup if merged.

[prahal]

Note I plan to ask for the inclusion of CONFIG_SND_SOC_ODROID in the armmp (for Odroid X, X1, U2, U3) and armmp-lpae (for Odroid XU3) Debian kernels packages. If you want to beat me to that that would be great

[meveric]

MIght be on topic. I asked for the removal of armmp-lpae from flash-kernel db for Odroid U3 per it is a Cortex A9 and Cortex A9 is supposed not to support LPAE ( https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team ... equests/47 see https://github.com/lgeek/arm_tlb_huge_pages listing and https://developer.arm.com/documentation ... entellonly listing Cortex A7, A12 and A15 at that time in the v7-A architectures that support LPAE..)

I see you tell to install linux-image-6.1-armmp-lpae-odroid-exynos which should be lpae enable per the name. Here I am not able to boot the Debian armmp-lpae kernel (tried 5.10 and 6.1) but I can boot Debian armmp kernel (same version). I only have "Starting kernel" then hang with the LPAE ones. This is an Odroid U2 board.
Note I have not tested your image. Though I see that you use debian flash-kernel so my commit might break your setup if merged.

It won't affect my image, as I use my own DB file for my image and Kernel which overrules the one that comes from the OS. Also I doubt Debian will add this change to Debian Bullseye, even for Debian Bookworm there is a good change this change will not be included.
While you're correct with your finding I need to rework this into my image and kernel builds.
Currently this change has no impact on this image or the Kernel itself.
But thanks for pointing this out

Note I plan to ask for the inclusion of CONFIG_SND_SOC_ODROID in the armmp (for Odroid X, X1, U2, U3) and armmp-lpae (for Odroid XU3) Debian kernels packages. If you want to beat me to that that would be great

This is already activated on my kernel images so nothing to do here.

[ben.h]

I've uploaded a working emmc u-boot flashing script and files here: https://github.com/benhowell/odroid-U3- ... n-bullseye

[meveric]

I've uploaded a working emmc u-boot flashing script and files here: https://github.com/benhowell/odroid-U3- ... n-bullseye

I know it's not very intuitive to find, but it can also be found here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=45450

I should probably add the file to the U3,X and X2 subsections as well

[ben.h]

I've uploaded a working emmc u-boot flashing script and files here: https://github.com/benhowell/odroid-U3- ... n-bullseye

I know it's not very intuitive to find, but it can also be found here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=45450

I should probably add the file to the U3,X and X2 subsections as well

Ah, I see!
It looks like your script is for flashing the sd card (based on positions), so anyone using that script will have to modify it to:

1. decrement each position by one
2. remove the sudo commands

Then call the script with the emmc device file (i.e. /dev/mmcblkboot0 (or whatever it is)), rather than /dev/mmcblk0

These are already taken care of in the script I posted earlier.

Thanks meveric.

[meveric]

This is the default flashing script from HardKernel without alteration.
Just added the updated u-boot.

Removing sudo only works if you run the script as root, else you would require sudo anyway and if you are already root and have sudo installed, it won't change the behavior so it's probably better just to keep it.
HardKernel probably only put it there cause people tend to forget to run it with sudo.

To be honest I don't know if the positions need to be adjusted. The same scripts for the XU3/XU4 were running out of the box from HardKernel without alteration so I'd assume it's similar with this script.
Can't remember if I actually tried it though.

[ben.h]

Just some anecdotal feedback.

I'm unable to run Debian Bullseye on my U3 board, either on sd card or emmc due to instability, random hangs, kernel panics, and crashes, etc. I haven't found a root cause yet, but have done a lot of testing with my U3 over the last couple of weeks with ubuntu and debian and have come to the conclusion that linux kernel 4.16 is the last stable kernel I can run on my U3. No matter what distribution I run, if the kernel is 4.17 or newer, I have all the instability issues mentioned.

Luckily, I can still build a reasonably modern ubuntu using 4.16.

Thanks!

[meveric]

I haven't run U3 actively for a longer period of time with the newer Kernels.. I mean it was "running" for 2-4 weeks straight, but I wasn't using it on a daily basis.. did some tests here and there but nothing important.
would be interesting to know what causes these kernel panics and hangs though.
As the Exynos 4 series of boards are the boards that are available in the Kernel tree for the longest by now. Long before any of the other boards had upstream Kernel support.