[8.90.6] LibreELEC 9.0 Alpha for S905/S912 devices

  • I can't understand your (plural) continuous reluctance to support aml devices. It's obvious that the resources aren't the best, and the development presents tough problems to handle with. But there's a big audience behind theses crap boxes because their performance is FAR BETTER than the rPi3, for a cheaper price.

    From outside, I've always perceived your attitude very hostile regarding all GDPR-2 's work. I'm sure that I can't understand almost anything that's behind the argument, but I know that losing a developer who has showed that huge commitment about this community project, is bad for everyone, not only for aml users.

    Edited once, last by Meiden (January 4, 2018 at 4:38 PM).

  • I can't understand your (plural) continuous reluctance to support aml devices. It's obvious that the resources aren't the best, and the development presents tough problems to handle with. But there's a big audience behind theses crap boxes because their performance is FAR BETTER than the rPi3, for a cheaper price.

    From outside, I've always perceived your attitude very hostile around all GDPR-2 's work. I'm sure that I can't understand almost anything that's behind the argument, but I know that losing a developer who has showed that huge commitment about this community project, is bad for everyone, not only for aml users.

    i agree he did an exellent job with builds that he provided.

    Thank you very much GDPR-2

  • Sorry, I do not agree.

    The main goal of the Open-source community is to provide support for everything for free and, usually, in their free time. Thousands and thousands of drivers have been made by the community for years, from the very beginning a new hardware is out in the street till nobody, but the deveoloper, uses them, doing reverse engineering, somehow overriding and patching whatever similar libraries are found, etc. Never mind, against all odds! That's the spirit!! Laughing at huge enterprises which only provide (sometimes quite poor and crappy) Windows (and/or Mac) opaque support! (Nowadays, this has mainly evolved to cheap and crappy little brief companies/chips/devices with Android support).

    Another completely different war is to battle Kodi logos and trademarks in those chinese devices you say, believe me, and that is nothing related to this issue.

    Anyway, do not blame a child for whatever his father or ancestors did to you.

    That's quite a naïve and unrealistic view of things.


    Hardly any of the bigger and serious open source projects (Linux, Firefox, My/PostGreSQL to name not nearly enough) would not have been even a fraction of what they are now if all the developers would have done it in their spare time, for free. Even a project with a million spare time developers would need management, and that can become a full time job pretty quick.

    Without fin@ncial backing of some sort achieving your(/our) ideals is simply not possible.

    Besides essential, there's nothing wrong with financi@l backing either. As long as it does not get in the way of the initial ideals.

    And no, the main goal of open source is not to provide everything for free. Not the product, not the support. It's too provide something open. It being free is only a bonus.

  • There is no reluctance to support AML. I have no plans to drop AML support in offical LE. GDPR-2 even agrees to help me with that.

    I know from my own experience that it is different to work as a community builder or in a Team. As a community builder I can almost do whatever I want. Working in a Team of 50-60 people you will have all kind of different opinions and styles.

    We are currently in the transition to Mainline kernel AML. This will require a lot of hard work and GDPR-2, kszaq, afl1 and others have done a lot of the heavy lifting already. And I really need to highlight GDPR-2's effort to bring that project to official. Afaik he has been the only one trying to upstream it. Which means he had to take heat and criticism also for work he copied from previous AML devs around here.

    I understand the frustration he has and I hope WE as a community can work through that.

    I formally invite every Developer around here to join our efforts to make AML better in LibreELEC.

  • I appreciate everyones kind comments, it means a lot.

    I've just had a productive conversation on the phone with chewitt for more than 2 hours, I need to reflect on what was discussed as this is not something either of us wanted.

    There is a team meeting tonight where many issues will be discussed with Amlogic builds being one of them, I can understand and acknowledge where the issues lie with Amlogic and that its a technical debate not meant for the forums.

    There was acknowledgement that some problems exist so hopefully during the debate some agreements can be made, I'm still unsure on how to move forward presently though but I'm more hopeful now than I was before, the main sticking point is that Team Kodi plan to introduce changes in Kodi v19 possibly that would remove all of the current hacks and workarounds that make Amlogic work at present and therefore will make Amlogic devices incompatible with LE/Kodi in the future.

    I have argued in the past that these devices can and should be supported until those changes are made, maybe not so much in an official capacity but I see no harm in adding the code directly to the LE base and then making community builds and this is the main sticking point, in adding support for a set of devices that potentially *may* to be removed, this is where much of the fights have been fought around.

    Adding support in a personal fork for Amlogic devices has irked some developers as they see it as an attempt to fork LE in the same way LE did to OE which I can categorically state it is not, it was created mainly so Amlogic developers could collaborate together on community builds.

    As GDPR-1 has pointed out, support has existed for Amlogic devices for some time with community LE builds, but nobody has taken the time to upstream this directly to LE, I have taken a lot of heat for this from other developers and this is something was has been a huge burden and has taken a heavy toll on me, every contribution has been a fight rather than a thank you, I am in no way blaming anybody for this as I undertook this task on my own reconnaissance with no input from anybody, the heat received and what I deemed to be a lack of support from more senior LE developers is ultimately what has led to this point today.

    At the end of the day I don't have the time or the desire to fight with anybody, I don't need the stress or hassle in my life when at the end of the day all I am trying to do is help the community, I hope things can get better and that from the ashes of this that there will be a positive outcome, for now the dust needs to settle and I would ask that people try not to inflame tensions any further.

    Thanks,

    Adam

  • You did an exellent job with builds that you provide to us. I will always respect and thankful to you from core of my heart. You are great devolper and have a good heart.

    Thank you very much adamg

  • Hi GDPR-2,

    you made an excellent job for us S905 and S912 users together with the other developers. I had never such a stable and fast system with my RPis. Channel switching times with my Rock64 tvheadend backend server are almost immediately. Even my wife has nothing to complain about anything.

    Thanks again for your help to get these boxes working so good!

    Michael

  • That's quite a naïve and unrealistic view of things.


    Hardly any of the bigger and serious open source projects (Linux, Firefox, My/PostGreSQL to name not nearly enough) would not have been even a fraction of what they are now if all the developers would have done it in their spare time, for free. Even a project with a million spare time developers would need management, and that can become a full time job pretty quick.

    Without fin@ncial backing of some sort achieving your(/our) ideals is simply not possible.

    Besides essential, there's nothing wrong with financi@l backing either. As long as it does not get in the way of the initial ideals.

    And no, the main goal of open source is not to provide everything for free. Not the product, not the support. It's too provide something open. It being free is only a bonus.

    When I said free I meant that developers do not get paid as usual, except those ones in big projects or the ones "given" by companies to the community.

    Besides, you are speaking of huge projects, which are highly financed, and I was speaking of the GNU spirit which moves a home developer to build a driver for his printer and give it to the community, or as a hobby, modify a small framework of his favorite ROM and publish it with the sources, or provide a patch to the problem he has just discovered, or even publish his whole Computer Sc. project of an operating system kernel in a newsgroup... I was speaking of the GNU spirit which moves those small ants to work for free for themselves and the rest for a Like, a Thank you, or a beer (nowadays), of just for fun.

    Of course, there are ways of finance them, specially those one involving full-time developers, facilities, servers, etc, (support is very common), but I was speaking of cases like this one: making for free (not earning) LE work (much better) in chips which their vendors do not care in Linux, but just only Android and quite poorly. For that huge work, they should be recognized and respected.

    Similarly to this problem, GNU community should have dropped all efforts on AMD/ATI open source drivers and keep on with the proprietary ones, as a result of being angry with the no collaboration of AMD. And many other examples, where open source drivers, APIs, applications or operating systems have overcome the proprietary/commercial ones.

    Naive, maybe, but that's how this Linux/GNU movement began and, as far as I can notice, what this Amlogic issue and these developers are about.

  • [...] the main sticking point is that Team Kodi plan to introduce changes in Kodi v19 possibly that would remove all of the current hacks and workarounds that make Amlogic work at present and therefore will make Amlogic devices incompatible with LE/Kodi in the future.

    What are those changes? Could you give us an advance? In the past, they removed support for some tricky hardware, but the efforts from the community of developers behind Amlogic to merge all of this must be presented, not as signs of trickiness, but as effective support...

    I hope you change your mind and go on collaborating with the rest to fight back and make this come true! :)

  • What are those changes? Could you give us an advance? In the past, they removed support for some tricky hardware, but the efforts from the community of developers behind Amlogic to merge all of this must be presented, not as signs of trickiness, but as effective support...

    I hope you change your mind and go on collaborating with the rest to fight back and make this come true! :)


    I only know what I have been told from people who are part of Team Kodi but the plan is to remove support for amcodec and the mess that is the 3.14 kernel and to only support devices which use mainline kernel and conform to v4l2 api's.

    Once this is done it will basically make it impossible to provide any releases with a newer version of Kodi, this is not happening yet but it will happen at some point in the future.

    Given that Amlogic devices do not conform to the above and it is unlikely that they will, it basically means we are working with devices with a limited lifespan in terms of Kodi support.

    It would take me far too long to explain the full details of absolutely everything but it appears S912 may survive, S905 and S905X there is uncertainty and S8XX will be guaranteed to be dropped.

    I do not believe there is anything we as developers or you as end-users can do to sway Team Kodi's mind, they are trying to force change in the industry and personally I believe they are making the right decision, Google is doing the same in regards to Android OEMs as well.

  • GDPR-2 I'm waiting tvheadend developers to release Android build.

    Then we can use Kodi for Android no matter what right?

    I don't know but I would assume that if the code is pulled then no the effect would be the same on the Android version as well, I'm not 100% sure on that though.

    There is nothing to worry about in the short term, none of this is on the table until Kodi M, and Kodi L is not even in beta yet.

  • Given that Amlogic devices do not conform to the above and it is unlikely that they will, it basically means we are working with devices with a limited lifespan in terms of Kodi support.

    It would take me far too long to explain the full details of absolutely everything but it appears S912 may survive, S905 and S905X there is uncertainty and S8XX will be guaranteed to be dropped.

    Not precisely. It is quite possible that S9xx (i.e. S905, S912 and so on) will get v4l2 in mainline kernel. For now most of S905/912 pieces are already supported in mainline, the main thing that is lacking is hardware decoding support. When this happens, we will finally be able to use mainline kernel on our devices.

    What will be dropped are 8726MX, S805, S802 and S812 devices as they're very unlikely to get full mainline support.

  • Not precisely. It is quite possible that S9xx (i.e. S905, S912 and so on) will get v4l2 in mainline kernel. For now most of S905/912 pieces are already supported in mainline, the main thing that is lacking is hardware decoding support. When this happens, we will finally be able to use mainline kernel on our devices.

    What will be dropped are 8726MX, S805, S802 and S812 devices as they're very unlikely to get full mainline support.

    I can't wait for that to happen. It's agonizing to see developers struggling with half supported gook or proprietary mess.

  • Not precisely. It is quite possible that S9xx (i.e. S905, S912 and so on) will get v4l2 in mainline kernel. For now most of S905/912 pieces are already supported in mainline, the main thing that is lacking is hardware decoding support. When this happens, we will finally be able to use mainline kernel on our devices.

    What will be dropped are 8726MX, S805, S802 and S812 devices as they're very unlikely to get full mainline support.

    Whats's the issue which is causing that delay in support hw decoding in the ml kernel? Can you give us any clue?