VIM2: Kodi lags on Android - GPU driver issue?

Hi,

I’m using a VIM2 and I’m having lags with Kodi on Android, it has small freezes of let’s say 1/10 second every 2 seconds. One after another. It doesn’t run smooth. So I was thinking that the problem is because Kodi is running over Android and there is a problem with the GPU driver (but I really have no idea what is behind).

Then I make a comparison with a Raspberry running OpenELEC with the same movie (720p) on Kodi, and there was a huge difference, no lags with the RPi3…

So I started to read about to test the VIM2 with LibreELEC (not done yet), and I found the following, link below:

" Amlogic has not released fbdev Mali libraries and has no plans to release them. These builds use libhybris and Android gralloc Mali driver to provide OpenGL for Kodi - this is an experimental approach with CPU overhead - this means suboptimal GPU performance.
If you consider buying a device for LE, do not buy Amlogic S912!
Issues: Kodi may sometimes crash or restart "

https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/5848-8-1-10-libreelec-8-2-for-s912/

Then I found this:

http://forum.khadas.com/t/about-khadas-vim2-docs/1007

I have to say I become a little worried. The performance of Kodi over Android was not the expected, and it is clear that is not running smooth. Is there a was to fix it? I have only installed Kodi on Android, so there isn’t any app making “noise” in the background.

The statement you quoted from LibreELEC forum doesn’t apply to Android. Under Android VIM2 GPU is supported natively.

I cannot comment on the performance issue you are experiencing

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I feel that the performance of Kodi on Android is similar when you have an old PC after reinstalling the OS, but without installing the GPU drivers. You can see videos, however they have small freezes regularly.
It seems that there is software (driver) issue in this. When I open the stats the CPU is working at very low level, however I don’t have info about the GPU. I feel that the GPU is not working properly, because with 720p movies the performance should be very continuous and smooth.

You can try to put GPU in Turbo mode (not sure if this works under Android):
echo 3 > /sys/class/mpgpu/scale_mode

After testing: The problem is only in Android. With LibreElec the framerate works ok.

Are you running the latest Android firmware (VIM2_Nougat_V171028) ?

I think it was ‘VIM2_Nougat_V170831’. However the latest changelog doesn’t say nothing about a framerate issue.

Hi

I see that android has OpenGL ES 3.0 drivers installed for the Mali T820 GPU.
I see that there is No Ubuntu image that has any GPU drivers.
I don’t know about OpenElec.

No “native” drivers for amlogic are available, and there i also NO plan to release native Mali drivers. Other SBCs have native drivers. A full list from ARM is here https://developer.arm.com/products/software/mali-drivers/user-space

There are some guides available for raspberry PI … https://gist.github.com/kashimAstro/2708a2e420900249e7ae8bc44ff3a875

Another guide here… a bit more promising.
http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali_binary_driver

Best regards

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