Phytium-based ARM PC


Thanks for your reports here!
I expected that they include a European power supply - and have not yet checked the boxes yet.
For anyone interested in the PC, I still have 10 here and will put them in the shop soon, just wanted to wait for some first reviews here so I know what I have to point out in the product description :)

Some reported that the Discord Invite Link to the Phytium server has expired - so here is a new one from the team: https://discord.gg/kCJfNZcBkc
 
What is good :
- It’s fast, YouTube 1080 p, 60 fps, or Zoom in Browser, no problem…
- 3,5 mm Audio Jack, and a lot USB Ports ..
- if you know how, you could even run Windows Stuff..

What is not that good:
- this Jet Engine Cooler, if you want to enjoy your 1080 P YouTube: get ANC Headphones ^^
- no internal Wireless Stuff, so you have to install a LAN Cable to your Desk.. , and you will need a Bluetooth dongle for the AirPods ..

It’s great that the USB works whit a lot of stuff, even whit my 15 years old webcam,
Seems to work out of the box..

Now I need to find out how to install Wine Tricks, and it will be a Gaming Computer ..

I still don’t know why I needed a ARM64 Mini Computer, but i allready happy whit it..
 
levi said:
Yes, the RTC is read while booting and written at shutdown. One small correction, you don't want an NTP server to set your system clock correctly, you want an NTP client which can read the time from an internet server and use that to set your system clock. An NTP server is the thing that broadcast the time over the internet for NTP clients to read.

On my eeepc, hwclock (provided I run it with root privs) reports more or less the current time and does advance. Note in linux your hwclock should be set to GMT and the difference between that and local time worked out using time zones. That's different to the default way which windows does it, which complicates dual booting, and means your file times are mostly wrong if you ever move continents.
Click to expand...
Cough. For GMT read UTC. GMT is now a time zone, not a time standard, so you should probably set your hardware clock to UTC*.

*This is the simple answer. For time nuts seeking a monotonic time without leap seconds there are more esoteric possibilities which are generally incompatible with standard NTP, which distributes UTC.If you get seriously interested in timekeeping, there's some very deep rabbit-holes to get caught up in.
 
ptitSeb said:
It seems that the 60W powerbrick supplied can be a little short under heavy load. And it's probably even more true when changing some of the internal part (like the SSD?). I would advised everyone to use a 90W powerbrick if possible.

@shouhuanxiaoji : 60W is not enough, lanefu from Armbian dev. team. measure a bit more than 70W under full load.
Click to expand...
got it. thanks, we will test it later.
 
Sounds Great, allthough i think i stick for now on Debian 11 KDE, as its now running, expect of Direct X9 on Wine which is just a matter of reading a Site on the Internet and make something in a Text Editor..
Never change a Running System, allthough this Installation over USB Stick is quite easy now..

I dont know which Packages are available in Armbian, i allready miss "PDF Import" for Libre Office in Debian 11, ..

Im still unsure whit the Zoom Client: I found Zoom over Firefox on Sunday quite fast, maybe its because the Phytian got enough power and ram..

Just a Disclaimer: i dont know how fast modern Computers are, so the Specs on the Phytium sounds really really fast for me, even if its just as fast as a modern day calculator and every Touster got more processing power..
 
I have done a test with default debian 11
Scores:
glmark2: 5002
glmark2-es: 4540

But the temperature on the lid of the case goes up to 49°.

The system needs better cooling and quieter fans.

It is also the fastest ARM system I have.
 
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A small update for those who have problems with some monitors/tvs:

Try adding amdgpu.dc=0 to the kernel boot options (in /etc/default/grub). Without it my Sony TV is not detected at all. Might be a bug somewhere in the amdgpu's new "display core" implementation with some GPUs/HDMI devices

A warning: This will most likely result in no audio via HDMI

A more complex way:

- Extract the edid data from your display while running with amdgpu.dc=0
- Save the extracted edid file as /lib/firmware/edid/<whatever>.bin
- Boot the system with the following kernel options

video=HDMI-A-4:e drm.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-4:edid/<whatever>.bin
Click to expand...

The result is: Working HDMI Audio and Video. You need to to this for every HDMI device that is not working or hope their edid data is compatible with eath other
 
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I downloaded the daily build of Ubuntu Kylin ARM 22.04 LTS (timestamp 2nd of March 2022).

Ubuntu Kylin 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Daily Build

CD images for Ubuntu Kylin 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Daily Build
cdimage.ubuntu.com

Wrote the ISO image with dd to a USB stick and it boots!
It does show an error about kernel not aligned on 64k (and one more error), but you can ignore that.
Firefox can play a 1440p YouTube stream.
 
I have installed armbian on Cruical P2 500GB NVME with Ubuntu 22.02 and runs without problems. Audio, video (amdgpu) und usb ethernet working out auf the box, cpu ist detected, onboard ethernet is not detected.

Video seems to be a bit slower than under the Debian Buster, glmark2 OpenGL has only 4500 score.
Compiling of godot was done in 18 minutes, seems to be equal to debian 11 (buster).

Thomas
 
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So the big Zoom Meeting today was also successful, i used the Firefox, whiteout client..
worked quite good, the only issue was that I flew out one time because I accidentally clicked on the Side Buttons of my Mouse ^^
The System got quite hot,
I hope Phytian will make some time in the future a Proper Firmware Depency for the Machine, so you could clock down the CPUs or something..

I found it’s much better that they made the Meeting in Zoom; you don’t have to look on a big Projection where you can’t read anything, nobody hear you when you don’t want it.. and you save about 1 Hour of Car Driving ^^
 
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Installed Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 on the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and so far it works.
I know it still might fail when pushing the power limits.
But it does make me wonder why I couldn't get Debian working.

Now that I have something to fall back on, I will put the original SSD back in and try the Debian installation again.
 
I put the original SSD back in.
Installed Debian, but still same problem.

I see at the end:

Started Simple Desktop Display Manager
random: crng init done
random: 7 urandom warning(s) missed due to rate limiting

And two more lines, probably my USB to ethernet adapter.

Tried with the expert install.
No messages about random, but last thing is probably ethernet again, but nothing happens after that.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I have no clue.

It's a pity Manjaro hasn't released an ARM version for (U)EFI.
I think I'll stick with Ubuntu Kylin for now. Unless someone has some other suggestion that is not too hard to install.
 
I'm not sure why I didn't find it last time, but there is a regular desktop daily build for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ARM.

Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Daily Build

CD images for Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Daily Build
cdimage.ubuntu.com

I installed it on the SSD and although the image is from today (10th of March) I got the notification to update and it looks like it's better to do so.
Before updating the Software Store didn't fully load.
After the update the Software Store did fully load for me.

Firefox isn't working, but you can install Chromium.
Update: The link to Firefox in the favorites is broken, but you can replace the link with a new link from the app list.

During installation I did see a message about missing firmware for AMDGPU.
So no hardware acceleration for now.
 
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Oh and i have a small issue: When i dont push on my TV bevore i boot the Phytian, the solution is whyrd: the things on the Screen are too big, the GUI is screwed up..

So first the TV, then the Computer ...

Maybe i will have another look on the WINE Tricks when i got some time, at the moment its a Office and Youtube Computer..
 
For the Red Hat fans, I installed Alma Linux and it boots.
I don't intend to turn it into a server, so it was just test.

I do see a message: EFI stub: EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL unavailable, no randomness supplied
It does boot, but is it a coincidence that Debian also complained on my machine about urandom warnings?
Or those messaged can be ignored?
 
Yes, probably those messages have the same root. Whether or not you can ignore those messages depends on the impact is has. I could try to estimate that, but if you can use the system, then I wouldn't worry about it much. You could try doing a '$ cat /dev/urandom' to test if this fills you terminal window with gibberish (press ctrl+c to exit).
 
Alma Linux is already overwritten on my machine.
I installed Armbian on a USB stick and I saw a similar message about EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL.
cat /dev/urandom does output gibberish with Armbian.

It's weird I still haven't been able to get Debian working on my machine, but Ubuntu and Armbian are working on my machine.
 
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