Support for A10/A20

    • Official Post
    Quote from lumpi

    I have somewhere an inet97f2 tablet based on A10 with some old fedora on it, should i have a look for it?

    You can, but in this case kernel config needs to be tweaked, to enable A10 drivers. You can try it based on my A20 branch here: GitHub - jernejsk/LibreELEC.tv at a20 (check last 3 commits)

    However, I think it would be best to fix A20 support first.

    Quote from lumpi

    I know it's pretty OT but such tablets would also be a target for a completely free mainlined android,

    that's still not possible, but should be close. I think lima drivers needs to be improved? I don't really know.

    Quote from jernej

    You can, but in this case kernel config needs to be tweaked, to enable A10 drivers. You can try it based on my A20 branch here: GitHub - jernejsk/LibreELEC.tv at a20 (check last 3 commits) the

    honestly I'm not really interested in getting this beast back to work, as my little daughter used it to learn walking, so the LCD has a couple of nice black spots. But should you be interested in testers shout out loud :)

    Quote from jernej

    that's still not possible, but should be close. I think lima drivers needs to be improved? I don't really know.

    oh of course LIMA that I completely forgot about. I didn't actually mean Replicant style, but vendor independant mainline based android. Let's see what will happen on this front. If anything at all :P Maybe the pine phone will bring this up to the frontline sometime in the future.

    Quote from jernej

    Fixed and rebased on latest master, which brings Kodi 18.3.

    Hi jernej: I am a noob and need some help building libreelec with kodi 18.3 for banana pro. I have so far used armbian with banan pro, but it will not compile kodi. I see in your post that I can build a libreelec image with kodi. I will really appreciate if you can send me some guide on how to do that for A20 board. I went to the main libreelec.tv wiki, but it does not support A20, just A64, H3, and A6. I see you have a separate branch for A20 at GitHub - jernejsk/LibreELEC.tv: Just enough OS for KODI , but I have no idea how to use compiling instruction from main wiki and build your image.

    What is equivalent command for bananapro device?

    Code
    PROJECT=Allwinner ARCH=arm DEVICE=H3 UBOOT_SYSTEM=bananapi_m2p make image

    I am planning to build this on a ubuntu virtual machine on Windows 10. Like I said earlier, I am noob, and need some more direction. Thank you in advance for your help.

    • Official Post

    Just be aware that there is a reason why A20 images are not included in LibreELEC master github repository - it seems that display driver has a major bug, which in certain situations garbles image on screen.

    With that out of the way, let's continue with BananaPi Pro. I didn't add support for it yet, but you can easily edit uboot_helper and add similar line like that I marked. Name doesn't really matter, but it's nice to be consistent with board name, like bananapi_pro. Second field is the name of device tree file in Linux kernel for your device and third one is U-Boot defconfig file name for your device.

    Anyway, command for building A20 images is similar to H3. Just replace SoC name and board name (assuming you used bananapi_pro):

    Code
    PROJECT=Allwinner ARCH=arm DEVICE=A20 UBOOT_SYSTEM=bananapi_pro make image
    Quote from bob_janes

    Thanks jernej. I am going to try building the image with your suggestion and come back here and report how it goes.

    I finished building the img file successfully, wrote it to microsd card and inserted in banana pro. Unfortunately, the system does not boot. It gets stuck on finding the dtb file. The dtb file, sun7i-a20-bananapro.dts, should be in LIBBREELEC partition where KERNEL is, but is not there. Here is ls -l command at sdcard LIBREELEC partition on sd card with image when punt back into my ubuntu system.

    jhaveri@jhaveri-TA790XE:/media/jhaveri/LIBREELEC$ ls -l

    total 104696

    drwxr-xr-x 2 jhaveri jhaveri 8192 Jul 4 21:19 extlinux

    -rw-r--r-- 1 jhaveri jhaveri 8372176 Jul 4 18:22 KERNEL

    -rw-r--r-- 1 jhaveri jhaveri 48 Jul 4 18:22 KERNEL.md5

    -rw-r--r-- 1 jhaveri jhaveri 98803712 Jul 4 18:22 SYSTEM

    -rw-r--r-- 1 jhaveri jhaveri 48 Jul 4 18:22 SYSTEM.md5

    drwxr-xr-x 2 jhaveri jhaveri 8192 Jul 4 20:15 'System Volume Information'

    and extlinux has extlinux.conf which is:

    jhaveri@jhaveri-TA790XE:/media/jhaveri/LIBREELEC$ cat extlinux/extlinux.conf

    LABEL LibreELEC

    LINUX /KERNEL

    FDT /sun7i-a20-bananapro.dts

    APPEND boot=UUID=xxxxx disk=UUID=xxxx quiet console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty1 (xxxx is really UUID)

    So at the same directory where KERNEL is, should have sun7i-a20-bananapro.dts, but is not there. Hence the system never boots.

    Thanks for any help. I know I am almost there.

    Quote from jernej

    I forgot to mention, it has to end with .dtb, which is compiled version of .dts

    Thanks, I edited uboot_helper and changed line to dtb, as shown below.

    'bananapi_pro':{ 'dtb':'sun7i-a20-bananapro.dtb','config': ' Bananapro_defconfig' },

    It is compiling. Hope it works now. Thanks again. I will let you know how it goes. Regards.

    So I made some progress. With dtb file properly defined, the image boots, good. But it hangs after loading kodi. Here is a picture of my screen. What else do I need to do? By the way, I did not compile any addons? Should I? Thanks again for your help and any suggestions.

    Update: I tried to run kodi from the command line in /usr/lib/kodi binary kodi.bin and I get error: unable to create GUI. exiting.

    Edited once, last by bob_janes (July 5, 2019 at 9:16 AM).

    Quote from jernej

    majorkalina since you build image yourself, it will be quicker if you just change this line: ffmpeg-95.0002-add-common-v4l2-request-api-code.patch#l126 to +#include <drm/drm_fourcc.h>

    jernej:

    My source from git did not have this edit. So I also modified line 137 in the patch as shown above and rebuild the image. But still same error. The device boots but exits to command prompt which seems to have fully functional linux. But when I once again ran kodi from /usr/lib/kodi/kodi.bin, I got the same error: unable to create GUI. exiting.

    Looks like I am close to running kodi, I know majorkalina has run it on banana pro, so I should be. What am I doing wrong? First I cloned the main branch from your code and then checked out a20. Should I have used a specific version of the branch as outlined on Libreelec wiki? My steps were:

    1)git clone GitHub - jernejsk/LibreELEC.tv: Just enough OS for KODI

    2) git checkout a20

    3) did the edit in uboot_helper as suggested

    4) PROJECT=Allwinner ARCH=arm DEVICE=A20 UBOOT_SYSTEM=bananapi_pro make image

    I know that there are issues with the video playing, but at least I should be able to get into the kodi interface. Looking forward to any help I can get. Regards.

    Quote from jernej

    That change is not needed anymore due to upgraded libdrm.

    As I actually don't own any A20 board and have no experiences with that SoC I can't really help you much more. Maybe majorkalina can push a changes needed for BananaPi Pro?

    Thank you jernej.

    I am hoping that majorkalina does come to this thread and sees this request. I will really appreciate if can push the changes for BananaPi Pro.

    Quote from bob_janes

    Thank you jernej.

    I am hoping that majorkalina does come to this thread and sees this request. I will really appreciate if can push the changes for BananaPi Pro.

    Very good news. I recompiled using bananpi config rather than banana_pro config. Now the system loads just fine on my banana pro. I played few videos from ripped dvds with vob format (I guess same as mpeg2). Some play just fine, while others have strange video. Like it repeats the pattern multiple times. Analog sound works.

    When I adjusted the player setting to disable HW acceleration, the same video with multiple parallel patterns, play fine, but cpu usage is close to 100%, so some skips every few minutes.

    Next I changed video from direct plane to EGL, and it becomes garbled.

    Does anyone have suggestions on what should I do next? At this point I am just about to call it quits, and wait for further development with A20 boards. On the other hand I am pleased to see a great progress so far. System is stable. Even if the video does not play properly or garbled, I can still get to reboot from power menu.

    Thanks jernej for all your help. Regards.

    Edited 3 times, last by bob_janes (July 6, 2019 at 3:37 AM).