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Armbian H3 mini FAQ -- 5.15

Important to know

  • this will be the last version of the H3 mini FAQ since H3 boards are from now on officially supported
  • Updating Armbian images prior to 5.13 to 5.15 or higher is not recommended -- see below
  • 1st boot takes longer (up to 5 minutes). Please do not interrupt while the red LED is blinking, the board reboots automatically one time and the green LED starts to blink when ready
  • our User documentation (one exception currently: use h3disp to adjust display settings)
  • our Geek documentation (in case you want to build your own images)
  • CPU frequency settings are 240-1200 MHz on BPi M2+, NanoPi M1 and Beelink X2, 480-1200 MHz on OPi One/Lite and 480-1296 MHz on the other boards (cpufreq governor is interactive therefore the boards only increase CPU speed and consumption when needed)
  • In case you experience instabilities check your SD card using armbianmonitor -c $HOME and think about installing RPi-Monitor for H3 to get an idea whether you suffer from overheating (sudo armbianmonitor -r will install everything needed)
  • In case you're unsure whether to test a desktop or CLI image simply try out the GUI version since you can always get 'CLI behaviour' by running sudo update-rc.d -f nodm disable later (this disables the start of X windows and desktop images behave like those made for headless use afterwards. If you're experienced you could also reclaim disk space by removing the libxfce4util-common package and doing an apt-get autoremove later)
  • especially for desktop images the speed of your SD card matters. If possible try to use our nand-sata-install script to move the rootfs away from SD card. The script also works with USB disks flawlessly (some background information)

Upgrading from older images

Upgrading from any of the H3 pre-built images (read as: all between version 5.03 and 5.12) is not recommended. We had one fundamental change while developing/improving H3 board support (switching away from providing one OS image for various boards and trying to rely on board auto detection at first boot) that might cause loads of problems when upgrading.

Therefore it's strongly recommended to backup settings and $HOME contents, start with a fresh 5.15 OS image from scratch and then copy back stuff. We're sorry for any inconveniences caused by this and provide a few tips/tweaks in the forum

#OS images with legacy Kernel (3.4.112)

Armbian started beginning with release 5.04 to support all available H3 based Orange Pi boards back then and extended the support to a few more H3 devices (also from other vendors) in the meantime. For a board overview you can look through our buyer's guide and/or Jean-Luc's nice comparison table.

Changes between 5.06 and 5.15 (not released yet)

  • Added improved camera driver for Xunlong's cheap 2MP GC2035 camera
  • Improved throttling/DRAM settings for the new 3 overheating H3 devices (BPi M2+, NanoPi M1, Beelink X2)
  • Added official support for Beelink X2, NanoPi M1, Banana Pi M2+
  • Improved console output (serial + display)
  • Finally got rid of (broken) board auto detection. We do not ship any more one image for several devices that tries to detect/fix things on 1st boot but provide one dedicated image per board (Plus and Plus 2 and both NanoPi M1 variants being handled as the same device since only size of DRAM/eMMC differs)
  • Tried to improve user experience with better/unified led handling (light directly after boot, communicate booting states through blinking)
  • Improve partitioning and filesystem resize on 1st boot making it easier to clone every installation media afterwards
  • fully support installation on eMMC on all H3 devices (u-boot and nand-sata-install.sh fixes)
  • Improved performance/thermal/throttling behaviour on all H3 boards (especially newer Oranges)
  • Prevent HDMI screen artefacts (disabling interfering TV Out by default)
  • Enhanced 8189ETV driver for older Oranges
  • Added support for OPi Lite, PC Plus and Plus 2E including new 8189FTV Wi-Fi (client, AP and monitoring mode, added fix for random MAC address)
  • Added in-kernel corekeeper patch (bringing back killed CPU cores after heavy overheating situations when thermal situation is ok again)
  • Added TV Out patch for Orange Pi PC
  • Further improve driver compilation due to improved kernel headers scripts compilation
  • Initrd support
  • increased kernel version to 3.4.112
  • Exchanged whole kernel source tree to newer BSP variant, cleaned up sources, rebased all +100 patches (fixed display issues and kswapd bug, new and more performant GPU driver, increase Mali400MP2 clock to 600MHz)
  • Added RTL2832U drivers to kernel (DVB-T)
  • Many minor fixes

Changes in 5.06

  • increase kernel version to 3.4.111
  • headers auto creation while install (eases kernel/driver compilation)
  • improved SD card partitioning to help old/slow cards with wear leveling and garbage collection
  • Possible to use Ubuntu Xenial Xerus as target
  • changed behaviour of board leds (green == power, red == warning)
  • speed improvements for 1st automated reboot
  • Integrates OverlayFS backport

Changes in 5.05

  • Auto detection for the Orange Pi 2 does work now
  • Mali acceleration works for all users not only root
  • verbose boot logging on 1st boot and after crashes (you can toggle verbose logging using sudo armbianmonitor -b)
  • more WiFi dongles supported due to backported firmware loader patch
  • all 3 USB ports on Orange Pi One (Lite) available (2 of them need soldering)
  • I2S possible on all Orange Pis (compare with the mini tutorial since you need to tweak script.bin)
  • default display resolution set to 720p60 to fix possible overscan issues on 1st boot
  • HW accelerated video decoding works for most formats
  • Booting from eMMC on OPi Plus now possible

Changes in 5.04 compared to pre-releases

  • HDMI/DVI works (bug in boot.cmd settings)
  • Reboot issues fixed (bug in fex settings)
  • 1-Wire useable (we chose to stay compatible to loboris' images so the data pin is 37 by default. You're able to change this in the fex file)
  • changing display resolution and choosing between HDMI and DVI is now possible with the included h3disp tool (should also work in the stand-alone version with Debian based OS images from loboris/Xunlong). Use sudo h3disp in a terminal to get the idea.
  • Ethernet issues fixed (combination of kernel and fex fixes)
  • USB-to-SATA bridge on the Orange Pi Plus works
  • stability problems on Orange Pi One fixed (due to undervoltage based on wrong fex settings)
  • problems with 2 USB ports on the PC fixed (wrong kernel config)
  • Mali400MP acceleration (EGL/GLES) works now
  • suspend to RAM and resume by power button works now (consumption less than 0.4W without peripherals)
  • Enforce user account creation before starting the GUI
  • USB and Ethernet IRQs distributed nicely accross CPU cores
  • Full HDMI colour-range adjustable/accessible through h3disp utility
  • already useable as stable headless/server board

Known issues with 5.15

  • Playing HEVC/H.265 video with 10 bit depth not supported since H3 lacks this feature
  • (still) not possible to upgrade server to desktop images -- better go the other way around if unsure

What you can do to improve the situation

Known to NOT work (reliably) yet

  • live display resolution switching. Fixes welcome (anyone willing to port the stuff from the H3 OpenELEC port?)

#OS images with vanilla Kernel (4.x)

Important: Currently no thermal readouts and no throttling/cpufreq adjustments are implemented in mainline kernel (THS). Therefore it's possible to permanently damage your H3 when running demanding workloads on it. Keep this in mind especially when you use any of the H3 devices not from Xunlong since they all overheat badly and think about reducing maximum clockspeed in u-boot (816 MHz max for example)

Mainlining effort for H3 and Orange Pi's is progressing nicely but since Ethernet is still missing some bits and especially THS support isn't ready we currently do not provide OS images with vanilla kernel. Our build system is already prepared, so as soon as THS and Ethernet are fully ready we'll release OS images (in the lab an Orange Pi PC is serving files as NAS since months stable with kernel 4.4 and USB-Ethernet and now 4.6.2 with native Ethernet driver).