Cubox Pulse support?

penedo · March 1, 2018 at 8:12 PM

Hi,

Looks like Solid Run has just released the Cubox Pulse, which appears to be an upgrade of the Cubox i4Pro.

What are the plans to add support for it, if any?

Cheers.

**chewitt** · March 2, 2018 at 4:50 AM Official Post

No specific plans for that device, but as long as SR have based OS support on a mainline kernel it shouldn't be that hard to support. As long as the drivers follow the V4L2 direction we're moving towards the iMX8 SoC should be supportable under the newer Kodi graphics architecture that we have been working on.

penedo · March 3, 2018 at 3:40 AM

Thanks for your reply.

Mister_Sparkle · March 11, 2018 at 4:07 PM

Hello as well. I have just ordered (pre-order?) one of the Cubox Pulses. Looks like they have a 12 week lead time. So, I suppose that means I'll be returning in 3 months in order to post results of how my LibreElec install goes.

**chewitt** · March 12, 2018 at 2:51 AM Official Post

At the current time there are no drivers and no NXP branch image, but one of our devs is on their list of people to send a sample to so if you're lucky things might change before it arrives.

NeeOder · March 19, 2018 at 10:39 AM

..will probably the old box Cubox i4Pro further supported?

..i mean on kodi 18 ?

**chewitt** · March 23, 2018 at 6:43 AM Official Post

Kodi v18 for iMX6 is in technical limbo. The older iMX6 interface in Kodi was broken for some time (more than six months) due to large surrounding changes in Kodi and nobody stepping forwards to maintain the code, which has been an issue for a couple of years. The irony is that iMX6 is maybe the most comprehensively documented SoC that exists for Linux, but anyone who has access to that documentation is under an NDA that prevents them from contributing their knowledge (gained from closed sources) to an open-source project. So right now we have a working OS image for iMX6 on a mainline kernel but the etnaviv DRM driver only supports a single output plane, which is not an impossible issue but affects performance (as drivers normally support four which allows GUI and video to be processed separately and combined before output which is more efficient). The DRM driver also doesn't handle mode switching properly so Kodi cannot change from 1080p60 to 1080p23.976 etc. and playback is not as smooth (and again, not as efficient) as it could be. There is allegedly some work going on upstream towards solving those, but we're a passenger in the process and right now there is nothing we can combine into something we can put our name to. I have a suspicion that iMX6 will skip a Kodi release, but might stage a comeback once upstream efforts on iMX8 have a trickle-down effect and improve things.