Meson 8* Lives!

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    One of the few benefits to the current Covid-19 situation is the one-man Meson 8 mission (Martin Blumenstingl) has been able to spend some quality time with an Odroid C1+ board. For some time we (mostly me) have been responding to WeTek Core and Odroid C1 user posts saying "upstream support is in reasonable shape, but there is no HDMI driver, we're waiting for a eureka moment to happen" .. and well, that eureka moment has finally happened 8o

    Before people get too excited, there is a big difference between "look mum, we made pictures on-screen" and "let's invite the unsuspecting public to use this stuff.." and there's still a lot of work needed to make things usable, and reliable on a wider range of hardware. Today we are showing one boot on one device, and lots of code stunt props were used.

    The first video shows literally the first boot of an experimental AMLMX image loosely basaed on LE master with a mainline Linux kernel shortly before 5.7-rc1 (shows as 5.6) along with the FOSS mali GPU driver (lima) and Kodi 19 pre-Alpha.

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    The second video shows Martin in the GUI trying to remember where the system info screen is:

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    Very nice and encouraging...

    I noticed your new device in the project files yesterday and wondering what you were up to... very cool...

    Ive been following Martins stuff for a while as well while i have been trying to revive the Meson8m2 into a project i have going here that is a mix of your amlogic-master and the LE masters but have taken a break from while i learn more about the inner workings of the LE build system and the whole git thing. Being a tech guy i get the idea of the newest and neatest but still like the idea of some of the older boxes as just simple kodi boxes minus the Android crap so i am glad to see you guys messing around...

    once again... cool...

    This is really good news, thanks for sharing and thanks to Martin for not giving up and all the invested hours.

    It's realy stunning: the latest kernel, lima and a pre-alpha kodi!

    • Official Post

    frankviana 8726MX devices like the WeTek Play(1) aka WeTek OpenELEC box are Meson 6, not Meson 8. There is little mainline kernel support for that hardware generation and nobody I know of is working on mainline kernel support. I do not expect this to change.

    Bubba2017 the above videos were filmed using an Odroid C1 (S805) and it will be a while before we make any attempt at public images for Meson 8. You can also expect issues with "M8 boxes" because there were probably 30+ different Chinese manufacturers simultaneously producing identical labelled boxes with slightly different hardware inside. Most of the hardware differences aren't a problem, but not all, so they will always be a bit of a lottery to support. I would expect any future official support/images for S802/S805/S812 to focus on a limited set of devices with public sources where we can go check what their legacy kernel has implemented.

    I've no S805 devices so i can't speak to them, but currently do have Eny M8S (m8m2-n200) devices now working on a build modeled around LE Master running the 5.6.0-rc4 kernel but still have a few issues to fix and i am sure there are a few others working in the same area as well.

    Currently i have put that part of the project on the backburner while a couple of us are working on trying to fix up HEVC support in the v4l2 and ffmpeg sources as hardware support is a issue with all the Aml devices so it makes more sense for now to put our efforts in those areas. But i do believe support for some of the older devices has turned the corner and not that far away.

    • Official Post

    Nothing official and I appear to have deleted the local branch I did my initial experiments with. The upstream kernel repo is here: Branches · xdarklight/linux · GitHub but there are few device-tree files and converting ye olde 3.10 kernel ones is not the simple eyeball aand copy/paste job of newer hardware. There is also no mainline u-boot support for Meson8 so it's a little fiddly to come up with the changes to make the image. Progress is also rather slow and sporadic .. Martin has been rather busy with day-job work recently.

    Quote from Demetris

    Some more exciting news coming up for this old champ:

    I have ported Batocera Linux RetroGaming Firmware on this soc thanks to Martin Blumenstingl excellent work!

    You can try and test it here

    batocera-s812-30-20210214.img.gz | by Demetris. for MXQ TV Box

    It should be able to boot straight on a MXIII-G/PLUS S812 board for the others you now the drill of renaming the dtb.

    Hello, I tried this and it boots up fine but plugging in controllers I don't have that pop up showing up to configure them, so I can't do anything basically. I would like to provide some logs if needed.