No luck with LibreELEC 9.2.4 on Intel i5-8250U and i7-10510U

  • So I have been unsuccessfully trying to get LibreELEC 9.2.4 Generic to run on two different laptops, one is a Clevo N130WU with i5-8250U, the other a Clevo N151CU with i7-10510U, both with Intel HD 620 graphics:

    • i5-8250U: System boots and seems to work as supposed to, but as soon as a video is started with the media player, all text disappears, only the icons remain, and I have to either restart or toggle the monitor output setting.
    • i7-10510U: System does not boot, it hangs with "Starting Xorg-Server", then writes something "GPU not supported?" and gets caught in a loop with trying to start the xorg server.

    The info found on the "text disappearance" problem is not conclusive, there are quite a few reports about it without solution, and in my case it's not about an older graphics card likely to cause problems with recent drivers. Any logs did not seem to help, so I didn't even bother. As for the i7-10510U it likely will require a newer version of LibreELEC?

    I'm really just trying to quickly get one of the two laptops (preferably the newer one with i7-10510U) to work with LibreELEC as an intermediate solution for my home cinema until I have decided on which way to go for a dedicated LibreELEC box.

    Any hints are welcome.

    P.S. I'm glad to report back that today's nightly seems to be working on the i7-10510U, so it boots OK and when accessing the media player, the text does not disappear. I'll take a closer look in the evening when playing around with it in my home cinema setup.

    Edited once, last by Master One (September 30, 2020 at 5:45 PM).

  • So yesterday's nightly has indeed worked with the following exceptions:

    1. I was not able to connect to my WiFi (when clicking on "Connect" in the WiFi dialog, no box for entering the password came up and nothing else happened).
    2. The GUI crashed and restarted a few times.
    3. The disappearing text problem occurred again, but not anymore after I switched the (default) theme font to "Arial".

    Is there a procedure for reporting bugs in nightlies? I know that the download page tells not to expect support but that feedback is welcome via the forum.

  • - Kodi-GBM instead of Kodi-X11

    - Open-GLES instead of OpenGL

    - Mesa 20.2.0

    - Linux 5.9-rc7

    - Experimental HDR patches (currently known to work only on Gemini Lake hardware).

  • smp, never heard of GBM before. Not sure what the benefits may be, because the Arch Linux Wiki page only lists lacking features:

    • Decreased software decoding performance due to a lack of PBO support in GLES.
    • Decreased high quality upscaling and upspacing performance due to missing PBOs.
    • In general, shaders for GLES are behind those for OpenGL.
    • No support for HDR, meaning wrong colors will be renders with GLES.
    • GBM has no accurate timing for a/v sync like X11 or Wayland do.

    And the catch with the experimental HDR patches working on Gemini Lake only, well that's only for a few Pentium Silver and Celerons from 2017, which I don't have.

    So is there supposed to be any benefit to running this on my i7-10510U laptop instead of the latest official nightly?

  • So is there supposed to be any benefit to running this on my i7-10510U laptop instead of the latest official nightly?

    No idea. I suggested that build for troubleshooting purposes.

    FYI: X11 will be deprecated and replaced with GBM in future versions of Generic LibreELEC (probably after LE10).

  • No idea. I suggested that build for troubleshooting purposes. FYI: X11 will be deprecated and replaced with GBM in future versions of Generic LibreELEC (probably after LE10).

    Doesn't seem to worth the hassle and the disadvantages, after all, the latest nightly has been working on said laptop, the problem with disappearing text could be solved by changing the font setting for the default skin to "Arial", and the non-functional WiFi is not a show stopper since I have connected the laptop by ethernet cable.

    But using that laptop in my home cinema setup is just a temporary solution anyway, looks like I'm going to order an ODROID N2+ for that.