AUTO_SETUP_HEADLESS disabling GPU

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I have a question regarding the AUTO_SETUP_HEADLESS option. According to the description, it says that it will disable HDMI, but also GPU where supported. Now I want to run an Odroid HC4 as my all-in-one device (NAS, *arr, Emby). So I don’t need the HDMI. But wouldn’t it be better to keep the GPU active, in case of transcoding by Emby or something like that? So utilizing the GPU not for the video output, but for other tasks.

Not sure if disabling the GPU is supported anyway for the Odroid HC4. The description only mentions RPi and Odroid C1, but I’m not sure if this is kept up to date or if these are just examples.

Thanks!

2

Would really appreciate a response, thanks. :slight_smile:

3

It supports indeed RPi and Odroid C2 only currently (not even our latest Odroid C2 image anymore), as for those there are ways to significantly reduce power consumption and memory usage by disabling some GPU/video features. So on Odroid C4/HC4 it doesn’t have any effect and you should see a related error message about that, when trying to manually enable this mode. The dietpi.txt entry is kept updated.

There are at least some ways on C4 to disable HDMI hotplug detection, CEC, forcing SDR mode, a minimal screen resolution and such. Check out /boot/boot.ini. I cannot say whether those have a significant effect, so you may want to play with them. I’ll get an Odroid N2 the next days, which shares the same boot.ini settings, so then I can do some own testing and probably implement a headless mode for those as well. I agree that generally hardware encoders/decoders should have a dedicated setting, when we’re implementing this.

4

MichaIng Thanks for your comprehensive response. If it’s not supported that’s OK for me. If supported, I would have used it. It’s always nice to disable stuff you don’t need. :slight_smile:

In comparison to my old 3B+, the HC4 is a huge improvement already, even without this optimization. Instead of 1 MB/s download (with TLS) I can now fully utilize my Internet connection. Combined with the Emby server, it replaces three devices (3B+, NAS, Shield TV).

Thanks again for all your work on DietPi. It really makes setting everything up a breeze. I’ll continue to support you on Patreon.

5

Did some testing on Odroid N2 now and found a way to reduce the idle RAM usage by 75 MiB by removing the console framebuffer: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/issues/5039
Can you check whether its enabled in your case:

cat /proc/device-tree/meson-fb/status

If it shows “okay” then you can remove it by adding fdt rm /meson-fb near the end of /boot/boot.ini. The last lines of the file then should look like this:

# Headless
fdt rm /meson-fb

# Unzip the kernel
unzip ${k_addr} ${loadaddr}

# Boot
booti ${loadaddr} ${initrd_loadaddr} ${dtb_loadaddr}

Nice about the dedicated FAT partition is that you can easily revert the change if if unexpectedly fails to boot :wink:.

6

MichaIng: When I enter the command, nothing happens. Maybe this doesn’t exist for the HC4? But anyhow. Since the HC4 has 4 GB RAM, I can live with “wasting” 75 MB. :slight_smile:

7

The files content has no line break, so you see the content in the front of the next command prompt :slight_smile:.

8

Haha, you are right. It says “okay”, as you expected.

9

I would love to get this headless mode / max. energy saving mode as I am playing with different Socs, C2, C4, Xu4, M1, Neopi, Rock etc…to achieve best audiophile results.

Typicall lowest energy consumption and lowest amount of interrupts etc whcih can produce EMI/EMF and disturb the audio playback is best.

I was surprised that even the governance model “manual” in the C2 image sounds much better than “performance” or other…at 250 mhz set for all of them…(would be great to have that as well as a selection in all distros).