Khadas Vim2

[Brian Beuken]

Not sure actually if I bought the basic or the pro, its reporting 2G of RAM for a basic, but has 32GB eMMC ram for a Pro, on board...
hmmm either way, here's a small report on using it. This is reposted from my Tiny Monsters that play games blog


This is an odd beast for sure, I had trouble with it simply because it uses a USB C cable for power, and even though it came with one my usb output from the monitor never seemed to give enough power and it would frequently die at the end of a boot.
Well finally I got a converter for micro to USB C, and also managed to finally work out how to update the on board memory to have a linux (ubuntu) system instead of the default, but actually rather nice Android

This is an 8 core beast (big/small) which should put it on a par with the mighty Odroid XU4, it even has a better GPU, a Mali T820, but only MP3 , not quite up to the XU4's MP6 but even so its a next gen chip so it might manage it. It's an ES3.2 chip, which even if it can't quite provide the parallel grunt sending ES2.0 shaders to work, its ES3.2 shaders should make them cry.
After a bit of head scratching which turned out to be nothing more than very bad documents that didn't immediately make sense I was able to get it to reflash, and then update.

Time for the graphics fun to begin but of course there's no drivers on board...oh well...

Installed GLMark2-ES2 ok, after I'd allowed the onboard installer to do an update and reset. It does not identify the MaliT820 though so its basically emulating and slowly as you might expect, frame rates so far are nothing to write home about and of course it errors a lot at the death, eventually exiting with no score.

I'll see if I can get the usual mesa libs on board and try to get a test build sorted...should only take an hour

And bugger me, that was actually quite easy, once I'd set up the standard libs etc, and also installed and activated SSH server with

sudo apt-get install openssh-server
sudo service ssh start

So that Visual GDB could make the connections, I had no problems getting the generic multi config Mazehunt to build at run at all aside, from the known keyboard problems, the chmod fix however got me control and off it went.

Its running very slow of course due to lack of hardware access to the GPU but its performing as well as any of the other units without graphics. So I'm genuinely impressed. That was the easiest I've had so far, and the 1st time I've been able to do a -j8 options without the target dying. Most impressive. It does get bloody hot though, and the fact its already encased in a perspex case means I can't add a heat sink or fan to it..but it does not seem to be too worried and is running all 8 cores at a nice old rate.

Will it ever get GPU access? I dunno...we'll see. Apparently Android has drivers, so maybe I'll use this as the Android port example.

Its a fast beast too, sysbench has it doing 10000 primes in 1.6212s, thats lighting fast..Odroid XU4 takes over 16 seconds thats a factor of 10 times and yet the Odroid is clocked a little higher.
If the GPU driver is ever released this will be a serious beast to use for dev...and OpenGLES3.2 on board will make it unstoppable...for now though its just a very fast CPU system.