Orange Pi zero 2W - enable GPU

As in the topic name. The official images provide a way to enable the GPU via orangepi-config, is there a way to do it on the newly released dietpi for Orange Pi zero 2W? On the official images, the GPU is disabled in the device tree by default, what is the case for dietpi?

Thanks!

Another problem with the board. When trying to power it off in dietpi, it just reboots itself.

ping @MichaIng maybe you can have a look

I’ve found an overlay method: https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/17qisxw/comment/k8f0m1p/
But I haven’t had time to test it yet.

There is an overlay indeed:

G_CONFIG_INJECT 'overlays=' 'overlays=gpu' /boot/dietpiEnv.txt
reboot

With GPU you mean hardware acceleration? HDMI works OOTB, doesn’t it?
However, important enough to add a dietpi-config option, indeed. Would be still nice to see which features exactly this enables.

You mean when you run poweroff, it indeed does a full reboot cycle?

Yes, HDMI works but of course I would like to have hardware acceleration. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a GPU?

I will try and check this, as well as the poweroff command again.

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OK, so the overlay works! It would be great to expose this in dietpi-config. Or even have it turned on by default. The renderer is Mali-G31 instead of llvmpipe. I don’t think the overlay does much more.

The poweroff commands works too.

Gnome installed fine, even wayland session works. But I can only see “dummy output” for sound (no HDMI audio out). The Wayland session seems to be a bit buggy - the kernel locks up sometimes when displaying 3d graphics.

I am getting kernel lockups/panics often. Not sure if it’s because of the gpu… But they don’t happen on Android, only on Linux.

I disabled the gpu overlay and they apparently stopped happening. But the performance is much worse. Drivers for this board are a joke…

EDIT: Nope, they still happen. The board seems barely usable under Linux.

I am also trying to get DietPi working on the OrangePi Zero 2W, as it seemed like a better replacement for the RPi Zero 2W. Sometimes it works, but it often crashes after a while, becomes terribly slow, or stops responding altogether. Additionally, it frequently drops the WiFi network. Has anyone managed to get DietPi running reliably on the OrangePi Zero 2W?

I think the crashes happen when the HDMI is connected, at least when I had it headless it ran stress-ng for a few hours. With a display it’s just a few minutes, then crash.

WiFi is unusable, most often I get “Cannot associate with the driver” error. USB ethernet is OK, up to ~350 Mbit, since it’s usb 2.

I run it fully headless via WiFi, but it is very unstable. I will try using USB Ethernet instead. Hopefully, the WiFi issue can be resolved soon!

I am currently rebuilding kernel packages which should fix onboard Ethernet. Probably some other changes enhance WiFi stability as well: Armbian · MichaIng/DietPi@4f0cc5c · GitHub

Once this workflow has finished, test them with:

cd /tmp
wget https://dietpi.com/downloads/binaries/testing/linux-{image,dtb}-current-sunxi64.deb
dpkg -i linux-{image,dtb}-current-sunxi64.deb
reboot

One thing about WiFi: It does not seem to be possible to unload and re-load the kernel module. This means, on first boot, if WiFi was not enabled via dietpi.txt, it is not possible to use it, without another reboot. If someone finds time to see whether this can be verified and replicated this way, that would be helpful:

ip l
modprobe -r sprdwl_ng
sleep 2
modprobe sprdwl_ng
sleep 5
ip l

We can then leave it enabled on first boot, and show a prompt about required reboot, when enabling it.

EDIT: I pushed the kernel to our APT server already, hence you can upgrade it now via:

apt update
apt upgrade
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