Hi, this isn’t a problem or issue, just a question. Is it possible that HAOS will be released on the new Odroid C5? Since it has already been released on the C4, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be released on the C5 as well.
Yes and …?
Can’t you see the next sentence?
If this is a disguised question if you should buy one, in the hope that there will be haos images for it soon (paraphrased: ~by the time you receive your package, or else!~), the answer should read as a firm NO. Never bet on potential future support, always rely on what’s known to be fully supported (warts and all) right now.
Could it be supported, maybe - it’s 64 bit ARM and comes with enough RAM/ flash. But that only meets the mandatory preconditions and is not a sufficient answer on its own.
If it will be supported in the future, depends entirely on ‘someone’ with this hardware going through the efforts to provide the necessary patches to actually add this support to haos - and then for the haos maintainers to pick them up – or reject them (more on that below).
Now covering the more interesting topic, would this be a good device for haos?
It seems to have a quite decent ratio between features and pricing, but there’s still the elephant in the room. Amlogic SOCs are popular among (proprietary android based-) tv boxes, that’s the majority of their userbase - mainline kernel support is somewhere between bad and non-existent. That kind of works out for hire-and-fire tv boxes, which will never get substantial updates. It might work for projects or libreelec and maybe armbian, who are faced with an enormous userbase of potentially supportable devices to cover, giving them a reason to spend substantial efforts to work on the integration of out-of-tree vendor patches and proprietary (video-) drivers. For a project like haos however, for which graphics/ video support is secondary at best, this would be a pretty major effort (especially going into the future, following future LTS kernel updates) - so that is an extra level of pain they’d have to sign up for (I for one wouldn’t do that, there are easier targets among rockchip and sunxi SOCs with full’ish mainline support - and it’s by far not as popular as the also labour intense RPi ecosystem).
Now let’s take a step back. At first glance, this device seems to sell for ~40 EUR/ USD/ GBP/ CHF (give or take), plus ~10 EUR for a sdhc (a tad more if you go with an eMMC module), another ~10 EUR for a PSU, another ~10 EUR for a simple case, setting you back around ~70 EUR. That’s very much in the price range for decent x86_64 thin clients (40-60 EUR will give you nice options on the used markets, Pentium j4XXX or Ryzen embedded r1XXX) or sub-1-litre PCs from the big four (skylake/ kabylake i3/ i5), which will come complete with PSU, case, SSD and RAM, also remain in the 4-8 (thin-client) or 10-18 watts (i3/ i5) range, will blow these cortex A55 out of the water, are cheaply expandable and will ‘just work™’ with the generic x86_64 images, now and in ten years’ time.
2 Likes
What about power? The C5 only drains 1W idle…
About the same as my first HA machine from 2017 which was available for $10 with 4 cores and just doing it’s job at the time
For now it is important that nobody buys a C5 expecting HaOS support. If you want a supported device just choose any ones which are supported (now) 
As a side note: It is important that nobody buys a matter certified product expecting ownership 
My Celeron J4125 (with a USB zigbee controller) chugs 4 watts out of the wall (in practice, averaged over multiple weeks, including PSU losses and everything) - and it works, today. Even with high electricity prices that’s o.k. (35 kWh per year), that’s less than most contemporary routers, access points or switches.
Thank you for the answer.
I actually bought it about two months ago. At first glance, it looked really good to me — the price was great, 4 GB of RAM, no need for a heatsink, Android and Linux support, a GPU with Vulkan support, etc. But then I realized I needed a few accessories for it: a case, power supply, 32 GB eMMC module for Android, and a USB eMMC writer.
I bought it from the official HardKernel store in South Korea, and in the end all of the accessories cost me about the same as the Odroid itself.
39 USD for the Odroid + 39.80 USD for accessories + 20 USD shipping + 44 USD import duties/taxes/customs (I paid that about a week later, after receiving an email from the shipping company saying that my package had arrived at my local airport and that I needed to pay the import fees). At that point, I was already quite frustrated with the total cost — 142 USD in total. For that price, I could’ve bought a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM and all the necessary accessories, shipped from my local Pi store.
Now, some of my experience with the Odroid. First, I installed Android. Everything worked fine until I tried running PPSSPP with Vulkan — it didn’t work. I was really frustrated about that, since their website highlights GPU capabilities and “out-of-the-box” Vulkan support on Android.
So I tried PPSSPP with Vulkan on Ubuntu Linux — that didn’t work either. And it wasn’t just PPSSPP; other emulators with Vulkan support also failed. At that point, I was straight-up mad. I tried a few other things, but nothing worked properly, so I unplugged it and put it back in my tech box for later.
Last week, I looked at it again and thought: Let’s try to make some kind of server out of it, maybe it’ll work this time.
First, I tried running UniFi OS Server to manage my switches and Wi-Fi APs. That failed with an error saying the kernel was missing a required module. Then I tried installing Docker — that also failed at first. The issue turned out to be the same: the kernel is missing an essential module needed to build the bridge driver.
I ended up disabling the bridge driver entirely and using host networking only. Basically, the kernel in their provided Linux image is terrible.
Now Docker is running, so I installed Home Assistant Core. To my surprise, it works flawlessly. I upgraded from a Raspberry Pi 3B with only 1 GB of RAM and a slower CPU compared to the Odroid. I did lose the ability to run HA Add-ons, but that’s not a big deal since I only used the File Explorer and Terminal add-ons. In the future, I would like to add a USB Zigbee controller, for which it would be better to run HAOS. Right now, it feels faster and more responsive overall. I can even view my camera feeds, which wasn’t possible on the Raspberry Pi.
I also have an x86 thin client — an HP T640 (link: https://shorturl.at/HI01U) with a Ryzen Embedded CPU, 8 GB DDR4 RAM (upgradable), Vega GPU, and a power supply included in the box, but without an SSD. I got it for a really good price — 80 USD (shipping was only 2 USD) plus 20 USD for a 128 GB NVMe SSD. For that price, it’s an absolute steal. I’m running Proxmox on it with several containers, including Jellyfin, for which I managed to get hardware transcoding working. I actually don’t know what the power consumption of that PC is. I might measure it later. Might actually bought another one to run the HAOS.
I definitely regret buying the Odroid C5. It’s not a bad device, but for me, it’s just not good. If someone is considering buying it, DONT. Get a Raspberry Pi instead — it will be much better.
The issues with the odroid are exactly what you should expect from SOCs with bad/ non-existent mainline kernel support and proprietary (graphics) drivers. You only get a hacked-up linux image (of questionable origin) from the vendor, transplanting their semi-proprietary BSP kernel into a linux distribution - if you’re lucky, that kind of works. But you will never be able to upgrade that to the next version or switch to a different distribution, as mainline kernels don’t have the necessary driver support and the old kernel won’t work with the updated userland (nor will the userland components of the graphics driver match the newer wayland/ X11 versions). It’s a dead end.
That’s exactly the kind of hardware you should be looking for (and if you’re patient, you may even get it for less than that, from semi-private sellers), a bit faster than my J4125, a bit more power hungry (8-9 watts idle), but a very decent choice. Bog standard M.2 B+M key SSD slot (taking either NVMe/ PCIe or M.2-SATA, admittedly only M-key is more common than B+M-key these days, but you can still get either of the compatible options), two DDR4-3200 SODIMM slots (taking up to 32 GB RAM), WLAN+Bluetooth possible (or already present), plenty (7) of USB ports, fanless.