Libreelec crash/freeze with AMD 2200G

I'm having some trouble with Libreelec and my AMD 2200G. To be more precise, randomly in h265 video playback, the video either freezes, with sometimes the audio playing a few seconds still, sometimes not, or outright crashes with a following automatic reboot. I experiences this with using the Plex addon or PlexKodiConnect, as well as 9.2 and 9.0. I also reverted BIOS versions step by step, as I found some people reporting issues with newer BIOS. None of it helped. The only thing I did not try yet was playing the video directly through SMB. A log is attached (too big for pastebin), but it doesn't really show much as the system just went black and rebooted.

Did anybody else experience something similar? If so, what helped? In the past I did run Windows 10 on that machine with direct boot to Kodi as it took some time until the iGPU was supported in the kernel. At first, it seemed to work, but even at that time there were already crashes, which is why I reverted the BIOS. Without success.

By now I wonder if my hardware (CPU, mainboard, RAM) has some fault, although RAM test seemed to work fine.

Thanks for any help!

It has the same issue on 9.2. I actually reverted back to 9.0 to test if there are less issues, but there aren't. I updated to 9.2 again though.

With without the Plex subsystem you mean just using SMB? PlexKodiConnect scans the Plex libraries and links them to the Kodi one. As far as I know, it still requests it by URL.

I will have a look at the Milhouse images.

Edit: Still crashes with using only SMB. I would add the crash log, but it is 22 MB. I can also exclude any addons because I accidentally deleted them while removing PlexKodiConnect.

Edit 2: Same problem with the latest version of Milhouse. The crash log is attached, but I don't see anything that could cause it directly. If anybody has an idea, I'm all ear.

An update:

I installed Windows 10 + Kodi again with the newest drivers of AMD and it seems to be much more stable. The only crash that I had was during sharing a Youtube video from my phone, but none from h265 videos. As I didn't change the BIOS anymore, can it be that something in the Linux driver is still off? Every version of Libreelec seems to have the issue.

Quote from Klojum

You can always testdrive the newest version of Milhouse's nightly builds with the latest&greatest testbuilds on a bootable USB stick... And see if things have improved. AMD seems to require the newest kernels/drivers in Linux. And yes, of course Windows drivers get more attention from manufacturers, so things should be more stable. On the other hand, AMD has been quite forthcoming in Linux open-source support, so that future is looking good.

I know, in the beginning my system would not even boot without crashing. The newer kernels improve it quite a lot, but for some reason there is still an issue in playback of h265 content. I tried the Milhouse nightly, but it showed the same problems.

Quote from Da Flex

Maybe new drivers increase efficiency, but don't solve the real problem. Your kodi.old.log has a couple of errors, which maybe affects playback indirectly.

You have a lot of add-ons, so I would try a fresh LE installation. Don't install add-ons, and disable audio pass-through at System -> Audio settings. If this vanilla installation runs without playback errors, add add-ons step-by-step to identify trouble makers.

Tried that already. Mainly because I accidentally deleted all my addons. Windows 10 is significantly more stable with Kodi, but even there Kodi crashes from time to time. By the way, on Windows, when I try to change sound from Directsound to Wasapi it immediately crashes.

Quote from Da Flex

Sounds like an issue, which is independent of Kodi and LE. I would buy an eGPU and disable the iGPU.

It's possible that it's a driver issue. Although, LE is significantly worse than Windows 10 with Kodi. With LE I'm happy if I can just watch a 45 minute episode without a crash and with Windows 10 it's a crash every 10 episodes or so. Although, I have to say that I don't use the latest BIOS anymore, because I read the combi BIOS causes some GPU issues. I will likely try it again though.

I chose that CPU specifically so that I can avoid a dGPU or eGPU that's why I would like to avoid it. Also, Windows 10 doesn't completely crash if Kodi crashes like LE does. And if it does, I added a task to restart it (which is hopefully working now after a few tries and no knowledge about tasks). I saw some posts that seemingly have it working with LE and no crashes, but the solutions didn't really work. Could be that I mainly use h265 though.

Quote from Da Flex

If you did a complete RAM test, then it's probably not a caching issue. On LE you could play around with different audio output settings. Have you already tried to disable audio pass-through, as I mentioned above?

I did a RAM test already and that seemed to be fine. I also don't use any AMP profiles but use the basic 2133 MHz configuration. I didn't play around yet with the audio settings on LE. Mainly because it needs to work because my girlfriend and I want to use it. I will likely play around with it on the weekend. I saw some posts regarding audio settings and the Ryzen 2200G, but nothing that was conclusive. Basically, the settings that are relevant are from Directsound to Wasapi and disabling pass-through?

Quote

PS:

That might be critical. The most recent GPU driver usually depends on the most recent BIOS.

Well, I had the newest one and it crashed. I saw that at some point that there was an issue with the comboPi BIOS so I flashed it back, but it still crashed. The older one on Windows crashed a lot less. Yesterday I flashed the newest one again and let's see. What crashes, according to the Event Log in Windows is the atidxx64.dll module, so definitely something to do with the driver. What I wonder is how it is handled in Kodi, because Kodi itself crashes completely with it. On LE that usually also includes a complete reboot, which is fairly annoying. On Windows the operating system isn't affected, just Kodi. Also not convenient, but restarting the application is faster than restarting the whole system.

Quote from Da Flex

Google for "atidxx64.dll" errors. "Final Fantasy" players have crashes with that library, too.

I saw a few of those, yes. Transferring from gaming to video playback is a bit difficult though. I mean, one error was the anti aliasing, which should not be relevant to video playback. It seems more a catch everything error.

Quote from Da Flex

PS: Take into account that ATI / AMD drivers probably have the same errors on Windows and Linux. I'm sure the Linux iGPU driver is proprietary, so they copy-and-paste errors among OS'es, and you get trouble on LE, too.

As far as I know AMD drivers are mostly open on Linux with AMDGPU in the kernel, even for iGPU. They made significant progress in offering open source drivers in the last couple of years.

Something else, I updated to the latest BIOS again and got my first complete crash on Windows 10. I have the feeling that the combiPi BIOS are not working properly for the 2000 APU series. I will see if it happens again and if so, will flash back. I didn't try out LE with the settings you mentioned before yet. Hopefully I will do that in the next couple of days. But first I would like to test out the newest BIOS under Windows 10. That OS seems the better choice for that as it generally runs a bit more stable in my scenario. Afterwards comes the testing of LE. I would definitely prefer that one as it is more lightweight, but if I can not get read of the full crashes with restart, I prefer a Kodi crash only with restart script on Windows.

General question, what do I need to do that my posts will be visible immediately and not manually checked by a mod? Reach a certain amount of posts?

Quote from Da Flex

Yes, it's necessary spam protection. I think your primary partner to solve the issue is AMD now. They get payed for providing solutions.

Any idea how many posts? I think it's both, AMD and MSI as my mainboard is from MSI.

Quote from robmcc83

it was late last night when I wrote that so I'll explain a little better how I got a stable system.

I had problems with both Linux and Windows when I put together this computer before even using libreelec, all we're graphic related and and one occasion the same problem was present on both fedora and windows so it seems certain things are shared between os'es.

I had to use fedora as anything below kernel 5.0.x Linux wise would not boot on my system.

Then came the agesa 1.0.0.6 pinnacle update and all the problems we're fixed and everything became stable.

As more bios updates came out and I updated to them I started getting strange fan behaviour and the system becoming a little unstable again (random freezes and if I played a video on YouTube on windows when I would go full screen I would get audio but the screen would just be green).

So things were clearly bios related so I contract gigabyte support with this issue and they were a great help. Basically latest is not greatest these days it appears and it worked for me.

The tech support told me there is no benefit being on anything higher for the bios version than the final version of pinnacle PI as anything after that is just updates for amd 3000 series or up and coming processors.

I questioned that as the latest bios also stated "improved boot times" but they said that's irrelevant to me as that's improved boot times for amd 3000 series not my 2200g.

Also as newer processors come out they will have to remove older generation support as the bios is limited to a certain size, this means the motherboard will support a wide range of processors but will require different bios versions depending what you use.

I was advised to use bios with agesa 1.0.0.6 pinnacle PI as this is the final version for 2200g anything after that is just support for newer stuff.

Followed there advise updated drivers from amd and everything works fine now.

Also Ubuntu since updated to to kernel 5.0.x so that also now works.

Also I need to add for me libreelec didn't work until the beta reached kernel 5.0.x which I believe was libreelec 9.1 the old 8.2.5 didn't work for me and wouldn't boot just like any other Linux distro below kernel 5.

Since 9.1.501 le has been solid for Me, had a few boot warnings but one was because I had virtualisation switched on in my bios and the other is apparently safe to ignore as it's only a warning and fixed in later kernel.

Hope some of this can help you as it can be frustrating.

But the fact my setup is pretty much same as yours (I think) and works fine you should be good if you follow what I did.

Rob

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That's what I also heard. I will likely flash back again to the BIOS before 3000 support. It's a bit annoying though as MSI restricts downgrades from the newer BIOS to an older one and you have to take a detour.

So for you everything works from LE 9.1? Because for me it doesn't, even with the older BIOS. It crashes anything from every 5 minutes to an hour or so. Did you modify any settings? Or did you do anything apart from default? I do get some warning as well, but the only thing I found for it was basically, ignore it, it's some check that is enabled now in the kernel. I don't remember which one it was though, will check when I install LE again.

The most stable I got mine was under Windows 10 with the newest AMD driver and the older BIOS. Even though, Kodi crashes from time to time, you can restart it with a Powershell script attached to the event. The newer BIOS crashes the whole system for some reason.