[8.2.4.1] LibreELEC Kodi Krypton - S905 & S912 devices

    Quote from diplomatic

    How is it that the LE interface is so exceptionally fluid and Android is like a slide show?

    You will find S905 AMLogic Android boxes run the Mali-450 GPU at 500MHz or even lower, using a GPU load scaling Mode of 1 - which means a 1080p interface or worse 4K is drawn onscreen pretty slowly. RAM quality and speed also makes a difference.

    Even worse is AMLogic Android devices seem to artificially constrain the Max. GPU limit to 666MHz with the device trees they use, when the max AMLogic marketed limit is actually 792MHz. We modify the device trees we use in LE to use 792MHz

    If you have not already had a look on LE Kodi > Settings > System > AMLogic > you can crank the GPU up to 792MHz

    Next we use a CPU Performance Governor by default vs the stupid Hotplug Governor Android media players use, which in reality is designed for battery life on mobile devices.

    Hotplug makes no sense on a mains powered media player. Maybe it's also for SoC heat control which is poorly implemented on cheap ARM devices, especially cheap AML S912's that have lots of Cores.

    The Android OS is a resource hog that runs comparatively slow on low powered ARM devices. It's gotten a bit better with Android Oreo now Google have gotten off their asses and started optimising a few things, to appeal to a wider Android TV media player / TV audience.

    The fairly modern (buggy) v4.9.x Linux Kernel in AMLogic S9xx Android Oreo likely helps.

    Having said all that, it's a real pity we do not have Native Linux GPU drivers for the Mali-T820 GPU in the S912's.

    Tickle the GPU MHz in Android on those and they are pretty damn snappy because of the included ARM tech in the more modern GPU, that also has better memory bandwidth.

    This Kodi ARM Tech Article makes for interesting reading:


    Kodi's Dirty Regions - ARM GPU Tech - improving Kodi rendering performance

    Quote from wrxtasy

    For a faster LE that still retains dual boot, also do this mod:[HOWTO] Boot from SD card, use internal memory for data

    I use a fast 16GB Class 10 98 Mbps SD card so I cannot see moving dat a storage to internal shared with Android imporivng speed noticeably at all. Far rather spend just a couple of dollars more on a faster slightly larger SD card than mess about with using internal memory and potential future problems. My S912 Tanix TX9 Pro 3/32GB is working brilliantely off a sandisk mega fast 16GB Class 10 SD card, so have no complaints about speed other than the usual delays in routing to KODI addon servers to get lists etc. and that is promarily due to teh what I call illegal routing blocking of many KODI linked domains. Getting rid of net neutrality in teh USA is indeed a retrograde unwlecomed change.

    So tryign to get arguably slightly faster memory by using internal I think will yield little noticable performance difference over a fast SD card, as the KODI slowness is primarily with initial routing and nothing to do with the memory speed IMHO. Internet streaming on most of the well known KODI addon linked to servers, once the routing is complete, is usually superbly good and stable these days.

    Quote from RayW

    I use a fast 16GB Class 10 98 Mbps SD card so I cannot see moving data storage to internal shared with Android improving speed

    Which speeds specifically are you basing SD card purchases on exactly.

    Is it Sequential R/W performance ?

    I'm talking about LE device speeds when writing and retrieving Kodi Metadata, such as movie covers, thumbnails, artwork etc from device storage.

    Unfortunately 8.2.5 Subtiles Test didn't resolve the issue. Kodi crashes with every single file with external subtiles.

    Still the 8.4.2 Test2 is the most stable version with working subs.

    S905X

    Quote from wrxtasy

    Which speeds specifically are you basing SD card purchases on exactly.

    Is it Sequential R/W performance ?

    I'm talking about LE device speeds when writing and retrieving Kodi Metadata, such as movie covers, thumbnails, artwork etc from device storage.

    Don;t know wrxtasy I just buy the fastest Class 10 16GB SD cards available and with these Sandisc cards they state 98Mbps clearly labeled as a selling point obviously. Don't have the packaging now so not sure whether that is read or write speed, the fastest is always read surely so assume it is that.

    Anyway I am prepared to try using the inteernatl storage if you really think it will improve writing and retrieivng KODI metadata but don;t want to waste time and effort for no perceivable difference. I obvioulsy take your far more knowledgeable based advice my friend. So what do you recommend in my case and others similarly using these so called ultra fast SD cards??

    \I do notice shut down takes some time which inviolves writing changes of co urse and have delays with thumbnails loading sometimes but I think that si because they are downloading from the internet.

    You are always going to be limited to USB2 write speeds with SD cards since this is the interface bottleneck on most systems. A decent speed eMMC can have much higher access speeds and should have a much better pathway to the CPU/GPU. For me installing to emmc is always worth it unless you have a particularly crap eMMC.

    Shoog

    Quote from Shoog

    You are always going to be limited to USB2 write speeds with SD cards since this is the interface bottleneck on most systems. A decent speed eMMC can have much higher access speeds and should have a much better pathway to the CPU/GPU. For me installing to emmc is always worth it unless you have a particularly crap eMMC.

    Shoog

    Thanks and yes I realise it is faster memory but will it actuially be noticeable. I do want to stay dual boot as it is far better IMHO and easy should anything go wrong with the LE install as easily replaceable. If as it appears I can use the internal eMMC memopry along wihtthe SD card running LE KODI system then seems I could have the benefit of both worlds. but as I say is it really going to show me any real improvements I can clearly see and feel ??

    Let us also remember that USB2 speed is from memory about 420 Mbps but that is far faster than even the very best SD cards (around 100 Mbps) for the time being so USB2 speeds are more than adequate. What is the equivalent data throughput speed of the eMMC internal memory BTW. ??

    If I decide to try using the eMMC internal memory in the TX9 Pro box for faster storage of my SD card running LE system ,then can I revert and return it easily back to how it was before ??

    It's no about data thruput...

    LE Kodi likes superior Random 4K R/W speeds. NOT the "As advertised" sequential performance.

    eMMC storage is usually superior for 4K Random R/W performance.

    That is what you use day to day, especially when Scraping (and reading) Kodi metadata for TV Shows and movies.

    If you have not already done so, have a read of this thread:

    The Best microSD Cards: Reviews by Wirecutter | A New York Times Company

    I've never reverted back to using SD cards for storage to be honest. I only use them now for booting, and then you can buy dirt cheap ones for that purpose.

    You should always do a LE Kodi .tar backup before doing anything.

    Quote from wrxtasy

    LE Kodi likes superior Random 4K R/W speeds. NOT the "As advertised" sequential performance.

    eMMC storage is usually superior for 4K Random R/W performance.

    Whats the best way to real world test 4K R/W speeds? I've used f3 (F3 by Digirati) to test whether the entire card is good, but its only doing sequential writes & reads. Do you know of any test suites that'll do the different tests?

    Quote from Shoog

    You are always going to be limited to USB2 write speeds with SD cards since this is the interface bottleneck on most systems. A decent speed eMMC can have much higher access speeds and should have a much better pathway to the CPU/GPU. For me installing to emmc is always worth it unless you have a particularly crap eMMC.

    No, actually SD cards are not accessed over USB. The SD card interface is basically the same protocol family as eMMC. (As is the wifi chip, believe it or not.) The SD I/O pins are connected directly to the SoC like emmc is. Linux uses the same driver to talk to both emmc and external sd. Now there may be a bottleneck with sd cards, as they don't support all the features that emmc chips do, but the performance should be a lot higher than USB 2.0.

    Quote from RayW

    Let us also remember that USB2 speed is from memory about 420 Mbps but that is far faster than even the very best SD cards (around 100 Mbps) for the time being so USB2 speeds are more than adequate. What is the equivalent data throughput speed of the eMMC internal memory BTW. ??

    What? You're confusing megaBYTES and megaBITS. You mean SD card speeds are 100 MB/s, right? And real-world USB high speed throughput is ~40MB/s. Doesn't matter what the nominal rate is. SD cards are not accessed through USB anyway, so they should be faster on these boxes, unless there's another bottleneck somewhere...

    Quote from diplomatic

    What? You're confusing megaBYTES and megaBITS. You mean SD card speeds are 100 MB/s, right? And real-world USB high speed throughput is ~40MB/s. Doesn't matter what the nominal rate is. SD cards are not accessed through USB anyway, so they should be faster on these boxes, unless there's another bottleneck somewhere...

    Thanks for all thjeinfo guys.

    Whoops my mistake, call it a senior moment LOL. Yes I am usually careful of that big difference with MB and Mb and often hammer that point home to freinds and others, as am a retired (15 years ago but try to keep up to date) qualified comms engineer including being very involved with datacomms up to 2003. Yep I know USB2 is around 420 Mbps and thought my SD card was 98Mbps but you are saying then it is 98 MBps or about 800+ Mbps an dindeed just truned up the packaging and indeed is 98MBps SanDisk Ultra Micro SDHC UHS-l. So if this uses the same bus as the eMMC memory there should be little noticeable difference between the SD card and with using the internal eMMC memory, yes ?? I know most reports I have seen in these forums have said that there is no noticeable speed difference betweeen installing LE to internal eMMc and installing and running it off of a fast Class 10 SD card like I have.

    I am willing to try using internal memory from my SD card based LE system, and thus see for myself and report back here what I find, but first I would still like to know if I will be able to easily undo such a change without all the effort of reinstalling the default boxes Android OS and the few APKs I use for the rare times I use Android ?? I have no means these days of measuring speed accurately so can only report back any noticeable speed differences. Also to save a long search can anyone easily point me to the relevant forum post re setting up to use internal eMMC memory when running off an SD card installation. ??

    Edited 2 times, last by RayW: Typo corrections (September 5, 2018 at 12:34 PM).

    i think real world tests show that eMMC is significantly faster than a class 10 SD.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/odroid/comments/2zy1tt/emmc_vs_sd_card_visual_speed_test_comparison/

    Of course just as there are different classes of SD card, there are also different classes of eMMC. Many Cheap chinese boxes bundle rubbish eMMC, but the eMMC bundled in with my Khadas VIM2 is much faster than any class 10 SD card.

    The data on your eMMC option is a viable compromise because the system partition is mainly just loaded at boot and resides in memory whilst the system is running, but if you don't use Android (as I don't) then its not worth the bother.

    Shoog

    Hi wrxtasy, I'm using LibreELEC-S912.arm-8.2.5-Chroma.422.10bit right now but according to my Pioneer receiver the video output is 4:2:2-8bit. Using a Minix U9-H. With previous versions (8.2.4.1) output is 4:4:4-10bit. Any ideas?

    Hi wrxtasy excellent build running an absolute dream installed to internal on my tx3mini 2gb. As a previous post is it possible to set up a sleep/wake function instead of shutting down the box?