System freezes on first run; new installation

1st Official Post

    Hello:

    The quarantine has allowed me to go back to this and try to install again. I used to run Kodibuntu on this system.

    Install from USB seems to go well. Reboot. Leia welcome screen good. Going through new installation answers (system name, IP, etc.), then screen starts flickering and system freezes. During the several reboots I was able to go in and get the log. SSH works but then also freezes. Please help. Log attached. Here are the details:

    - Using LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-9.2.1.img.gz

    - M3N78-EM motherboard with AMD Athlon 64 X2

    - NVIDIA GeForce 8300 in MoBo

    - HDMI connection to Samsung monitor

    I'm fairly experienced in Linux and do have two other systems in the house running OpenELEC (which I want to upgrade now) and a MythBuntu server (also due to upgrade).

    Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

    Thank you.

    Quote from lrusak

    Buy a newer system. The NVIDIA GeForce 8300 isn't even supported by nvidia anymore.

    Thank you, but that doesn't seem to be the problem since the initial screens do work and I am able to nicely and briefly navigate the menus with no issues. Even the beautiful Leia splash screen shows up nicely. Also, I just looked up the drivers on the NVIDIA site and the latest upgrade to the 8300 for Linux x64 is Version: 340.1080 - Release Date: Mon Dec 23, 2019. So just 3 months ago.

    Any other ideas?

    • Official Post

    The crash logs stop at the point where Kodi creates an OpenGL context so it's reasonable to assume there's an issue with the driver. The 8300 is on the "supported" list for the 340.xx driver but I doubt it's been properly QA tested in years - the focus is always on newer cards. You could try self-building with the latest driver bump (we are using 304.107 so it's a macro change) .. I'm not sure you'll get too much interest from staff on chasing support for super old kit as the 8300 was launched 13-years ago and an RPi3 beats it hands-down on playback performance.

    Quote from chewitt

    The crash logs stop at the point where Kodi creates an OpenGL context so it's reasonable to assume there's an issue with the driver. The 8300 is on the "supported" list for the 340.xx driver but I doubt it's been properly QA tested in years - the focus is always on newer cards. You could try self-building with the latest driver bump (we are using 304.107 so it's a macro change) .. I'm not sure you'll get too much interest from staff on chasing support for super old kit as the 8300 was launched 13-years ago and an RPi3 beats it hands-down on playback performance.

    Well, thank you so much for looking at the log and giving me that feedback.

    I ended up installing Mint to see how far I could get Kodi to install, and sure enough as you both hinted at, everything does point to a video card issue. The whole Mint installation is fine until I update the driver through the Driver Manager to the Version 340.107-0ubuntu.18.04.4 (the only other that shows up besides the default Nouveau). I tried installing the version from the NVIDIA download site and it errored-out unable to install.

    So...I hear you about the RPi3, and for 35 bucks it seems like a no-brainer, but hey, I ain't going nowhere until this quarantine ends ;) and since I already have this nice appliance-like powerful enough system connected...could you please expand on that "self-building with the latest driver bump"? What exactly do you mean...like building Kodi (or LibreELEC) from code and somehow using the new driver in the mix? This could turn into a nice quarantine project.

    • Official Post

    Read Compile [LibreELEC.wiki] .. checkout the "libreelec-9.2" branch and "PROJECT=Generic ARCH=x86_64 make image" to compile. Once you have a working image you need to edit packages/x11/driver/xf86-video-nvidia-legacy/package.mk and bump the driver (change version and remove the SHA256 hash) and re-run the build command. If you're lucky it will download/build/update the legacy driver. Test the image .. but don't get hopes up. You may actually be better off with an older driver version, but the best way to achieve that is to clean install and test older LE releases (9.0.2, 8.2.5) which will have older drivers embedded. NB: If you find that works you won't be able to simply revert the version in the current LE 9.2 package to much older versions as at some point the old driver will lose ABI compatibility with newer x11.