Support for Odroid XU4?

1st Official Post

    So is there any way that a release could be made for the Odroid XU4? I have a standalone of Kodi tied into RetroPie, but I would prefer to have the great build that is LE as a build for all of my TVs. Right now I use Pi 3 boards which is OK, but honestly the XU4 kicks the snot out of them and the experience I would wager would be so much smoother. Does the dev team need a board to work with?

    • Official Post

    Lakka devs already have a bootable XU3 image that should be more or less copy/pasteable into our buildsystem to provide core board support. However Retroplayer != Kodi. If the device has DRM (direct rendering manager) support in the kernel (ideally mainline, worse some odroid specific kernel) it should be fairly simple to get the Kodi (Leia) GUI running as the DRM framework in Kodi is now quite mature and has been tested on a wide range of devices. However GUI != awesome performance and hardware decode will require an Exynos V4L2 driver. If that also exists things become theoretically possible but you'll hit some challenges with V4L2 support being on the bleeding edge of current kernel and Kodi development and some of the 'standards' are still in development and a little fluid right now. The main API that things need to coagulate around is targeted for the 4.19 kernel which is late summer, although things are now close enough to end spec that developers have something to pursue that won't need major rework when things are finalised.

    While that's generally positive, the normal challenge with older boards (even great ones) is that by the time all the standards settle down a new one appears (with different chips) and then the number of technically capable people interested on adding support for the old model drops off because they all have new shiny playthings to poke.

    Yes it has DRM

    Yes it has V4L2

    It has support for mainline, although there's a LTS 4.14 kernel maintained by manufacturer which has fixes and additional drivers that are not in mainline (e.g. Mali GPU drivers :D)

    I've been running leia on DRM/GBM for quite some time (I have a branch of krypton with DRM patches too). With a modified ffmpeg, you can even run drmprime decoder and renderer:

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    (mali drivers don't support dmabuf_import atm, so only drmprime direct-to-plane can be used. ffmpeg patches are required to convert in hardware and with dmabuf support the NV12 output from decoder to RGB that is accepted by the exynos DRM. also kernel patches are required to enable overlay plane, since by default there's only the primary plane. ideally, with new drivers with dmabuf_import support, we can use drmprime-egl renderer with no patching required).