Odroid C2

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    There are several people in the community looking at the Odroid C2 including people on LE staff and currently we're working to ensure people are collaborating together instead of working in isolation. One of our staff has LE "running" on C2 hardware but Kodi segfaults frequently so it's still early days. If you're a user looking to purchase a C2 for Kodi use; it's a nice spec but isn't something we can recommend yet. If you're a developer who'd like to help us tackle the C2 please send myself and/or lrusak a PM so we can loop you into our efforts.

    I had a go at building that branch (with ARCH=aarch64).
    It appeared to build successfully, giving me an image with boot.ini, KERNEL and SYSTEM. (I'm not sure if we don't need INITRD and meson64_odroidc2.dtb as well).

    Unfortunately after dd'ed to a microSD, it wouldn't progress beyond uboot (solid blue LED).
    Beyond this, I'm a bit out of my league, but will keep trying a few things towards any sort of improvement.

    Edited once, last by Dez (March 29, 2016 at 10:08 AM).

    Quote from Dez


    I had a go at building that branch (with ARCH=aarch64).
    It appeared to build successfully, giving me an image with boot.ini, KERNEL and SYSTEM. (I'm not sure if we don't need INITRD and meson64_odroidc2.dtb as well).

    Unfortunately after dd'ed to a microSD, it wouldn't progress beyond uboot (solid blue LED).
    Beyond this, I'm a bit out of my league, but will keep trying a few things towards any sort of improvement.

    Did you just dd the .img file straight to the flash card? I'm no expert, but I'm thinking that you might have to do a little more work on the SD card first, such as creating partitions and loading information into them. Maybe this will help, though I'm not sure that it is exactly right for ARM:
    Manual Installation - OpenELEC

    I'm really excited about my new C2 and would love to see OpenELEC running on it. If I can do anything to help, let me know.

    Quote from afremont

    Did you just dd the .img file straight to the flash card? I'm no expert, but I'm thinking that you might have to do a little more work on the SD card first, such as creating partitions and loading information into them. Maybe this will help, though I'm not sure that it is exactly right for ARM:
    Manual Installation - OpenELEC

    I think you're right, and I'm literally just blindly bumbling my way through this at the moment.

    zalaare has some make scripts for the C1 that might work for the C2 with some modifications.
    OpenELEC-Odroid/scripts at odroid-6.0 · zalaare/OpenELEC-Odroid · GitHub

    Another thing I noticed, and possibly doesn't matter too much, is that the boot.ini looks a bit different to the C1 boot.ini.
    GitHub - mdrjr/c2_bootini

    I'll keep trying with the lrusak branch and then hopefully eventually try with LE.
    Even if I get nowhere with this (which is highly likely), at least I'm learning a lot.
    [hr]

    Quote from Jeroen


    I will give it another go with, i have already successfully gotten gentoo to run on the c2, probably need to fuse the uboot manualy to the sd.

    Please let us know how you go :)

    Edited once, last by Dez (March 29, 2016 at 6:54 PM).

    Quote from Dez

    I think you're right, and I'm literally just blindly bumbling my way through this at the moment.

    zalaare has some make scripts for the C1 that might work for the C2 with some modifications.
    OpenELEC-Odroid/scripts at odroid-6.0 · zalaare/OpenELEC-Odroid · GitHub

    Another thing I noticed, and possibly doesn't matter too much, is that the boot.ini looks a bit different to the C1 boot.ini.
    GitHub - mdrjr/c2_bootini

    I'll keep trying with the lrusak branch and then hopefully eventually try with LE.
    Even if I get nowhere with this (which is highly likely), at least I'm learning a lot.
    [hr]

    Please let us know how you go :)


    I hope I didn't send you on a wild goose chase with that, but it seems plausible to me that you'd need to have some basic structure in place on the SD card. When I get some time, I'll see what kind of progress that I can make, but don't expect much. Seems like the boot.ini (guessing here) wouldn't stop you from getting something out of it. Do you have any way to connect to the "console" serial port on the board? If the kernel begins loading, there might be some signs of life visible there without the HDMI working.

    I'm looking forward to seeing if you guys make any progress with this. I'm so busy with life things right now that I don't have time to play with it, maybe tonight or tomorrow I will be able to find some time. I found another SD card (so I don't have backup or wipe my Ubuntu install), so I at least have something to use for OpenELEC tinkering.

    Aaaargh......I shouldn't have used an Evo card. I've had trouble with the early Evo's before.
    This time I tried with another card (properly set up with bootloader) and at least got to the boot screen before stopping. Will try fiddling around with it more when I make a console cable and can get more time from work.

    Edited once, last by Dez (March 30, 2016 at 10:31 AM).

    Quote from Dez


    Aaaargh......I shouldn't have used an Evo card. I've had trouble with the early Evo's before.
    This time I tried with another card (properly set up with bootloader) and at least got to the boot screen before stopping. Will try fiddling around with it more when I make a console cable and can get more time from work.

    Can you provide some more detail about how you set up your card?
    [hr]
    I did a git clone of the Openelec repository listed above (zalaare) and then tried doing a make all on a C2 runing the Ubuntu distro with all updates. The first thing I noticed was that the configured options didn't seem right. For example OpenGLES was set to no. AIUI the C2 supports GL ES 2.0, so.... It ran for some time and then blew up with an internal compiler error.

    [font="Arial"]Upon a closer examination, the config option defaults are worse than I thought. It's attempting to build for an x86 arch, and I KNOW that's not right. ;;) Can someone tell me how to properly set the config options so that I can do the build properly? If anyone knows of a howto out there, I'd appreciate knowing about it. Thanks.[/font]

    [font="Arial"]It looks like today's weather is going to be wet, so I should have some time to play with this. If I figure anything out, I'll be back with the information.[/font]

    [font="Arial"]EDIT: I found this: Compile from source - OpenELEC so I now have somewhat of a clue. Nice to see that I can use a faster machine to do the build (cross-compile). Some help on the proper environment variables for a C2 would be appreciated.[/font]

    [font="Arial"]EDIT2: Looks like this is getting closer now: [font="monospace, Courier"]PROJECT=RPi2 ARCH=aarch64 make image[/font][/font]

    Edited once, last by afremont (March 30, 2016 at 1:32 PM).

    Quote from vpeter


    Odroid != RPi2

    OOps, I pasted the wrong thing. I did do the PROJECT=Odroid ARCH=aarch64 make image.

    I see that there are some "devices" directories for C1, U2 and XU3, but I don't see any way to specify one or the other. I'm assuming that this is resolved at run time and that all of them are supported by the same image file and that the C1 collection is what is used by the C2. Does that sound reasonable?
    [hr]
    EDIT: Okay, now I'm getting an interesting error. It looks like wants to download some kernel source, but doesn't have the proper version numbers:

    [font="Courier New"] GET linux
    [/font]
    [font="Courier New"]--2016-03-30 08:13:36-- linux-0.0invalid.tar.xz[/font]
    [font="Courier New"]Resolving freeweb.mine.nu (freeweb.mine.nu)... 178.32.220.211[/font]
    [font="Courier New"]Connecting to freeweb.mine.nu (freeweb.mine.nu)|178.32.220.211|:80... connected.[/font]
    [font="Courier New"]HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found[/font]
    [font="Courier New"]2016-03-30 08:13:36 ERROR 404: Not Found.[/font]

    This repeats over and over using different servers, then finally fails:

    [font="Courier New"]Cant't get linux sources : linux-0.0invalid.tar.xz
    [/font]
    [font="Courier New"] Try later !![/font]
    [font="Courier New"]make: *** [image] Error 1[/font]

    [font="Arial"]I don't think trying again later is going to help. ;)[/font]

    [font="Arial"]Any ideas???
    [/font]

    Edited once, last by afremont (March 30, 2016 at 2:19 PM).

    I don't think the C1 project from @zalaare's fork will work at all on a C2.
    If you did want to build it to test, use PROJECT=Odroid ARCH=arm DEVICE=C1 make (image or release...etc)

    If trying @lrusak's version, I don't think you cloned the aarch64-odroid-c2 branch and ended up with the main fork.

    Try git clone GitHub - lrusak/LibreELEC.tv: 'Just enough OS' for Kodi --branch aarch64-odroid-c2

    To build, use PROJECT=Odroid_C2 ARCH=aarch64 make image

    DD'ing the resulting image didn't work at all for me, so instead did this;

    To set up a microSD, just follow the instructions at en:c2_building_u-boot [Odroid Wiki]

    Rename the kernel file in the Target folder to KERNEL and the system file to SYSTEM and copy them on to the prepared microSD (or just extract and copy them from the .tar or .img.gz files in the Target folder).

    Copy the boot.ini file from /http://LibreELEC.tv/projects/Odroid_C2/bootloader folder to the microSD.
    There's probably an easier way to do this.

    This got me to the splash/boot screen with a prompt.....

    Edited once, last by Dez (March 30, 2016 at 5:59 PM).