805/905? Official release ?

1st Official Post

    Hi,

    General question out of curiosity, no dates or firm commitment required… :)

    I see talk of AMLogic devices moving over to a mainstream kernel at some point, I guess simplifying the support and build processes, would that mean there is a chance of the better (Kszaq’s) builds being merged into an “Official” release for the 805/905? based boxes ?

    Like I said just curious....

    • Official Post

    Current estimates on availability of a mainline kernel do not align with Kodi Leia schedules so Leia will need to use amcodec and the existing 3.10 and 3.14 kernels. That breathes a stay of execution on MX chipsets but it makes the decision to expend effort on generic kernels harder. There are benefits to unifying some of the community efforts further; IMHO too many community builders are "developing in the release branch" with a high rate of release iteration so providing a project for things to focus on will stabilise things. However, all work on the 3.10 and 3.14 kernels is ultimately "lipstick on a pig" as the second we have a viable mainline kernel we will drop support for anything that cannot run it. Right now S805 era boards will probably survive (no guarantee, but they have a lot of IP in common with S905 and newer) while MX based devices will bite the dust.

    So it's possible, but much is in the hands of community builders agreeing to align their efforts. So far no PR's have been received on GitHub.

    Hi Chewitt,

    Thanks for that, very informative! Please understand I’m a really just curious I have no axe to grind in anyway shape or form J

    I don’t think anyone could argue too hard about dropping support for the MX chips, I would imagine given their age and the slow emergence of 4K, X265,10bit content/hardware people would be looking at upgrades anyway..

    I kinda see where you are coming from with the “Develop in release” statement, maybe a little too much tinkering, but then on the flip side you need to get build sout there to test and get feedback, down to labeling I suppose…

    I have seen Kszaq mention the new kernel so it looks like the awareness is there, maybe when he is back in the swing of things we will see some love for the 905 chips in Git ?

    Thanks again…