Minix U9-H freeze on kodi loading page / black screen

Quote from 0rca

Just wanted to check in and say that I am one of those other users. I have exactly the same device, the same firmware (which I suspect is the culprit) and the same issue as the OP.

+1

Ok. I hopefully may be able to shed some light at this problem.

I tried several SDs. 2Gb, 8Gb, 16Gb. Slow ones and fast ones. In all of them I end up with the issues reported above. But... with an 1Gb SD it miraculously worked.

Maybe it is an issue with the partition resizer?

All of the SDs tested boot the horribly outdated Coreelec 9.2.8 normally, so it is not an issue with the SD cards.

The 1GB size of the card is not important. What does matter is that it's an older and slower card. Modern high speed cards use different voltages and if that part of setup isn't handled correctly within u-boot the SD card won't be detected when the kernel loads. The older card does not support the higher-speed modes and thus sidesteps the issue. Depending on your perspective this is either vendor u-boot failing to setup the card correctly, or the kernel mmc drivers failing to handle the state u-boot put the card in. I'm in the blame u-boot camp since the Amlogic code quality isn't brilliant. It's all been hacked to work togther.. and we're not using one half of the hackfest.

I have zero interest in trying to investigate or improve compat with some random Android ROM that people have loaded. Reverting back to the factory image seems to be the pre-requisite.

Quote from chewitt

Reverting back to the factory image seems to be the pre-requisite.

Well, it makes sense, but I reverted the firmware to the original 2018 one (Android 6) and no... unfortunately that is not it.

While on the ¨"Community Edition¨¨¨" ROM. I just imaged the 1GB working SD one into a 16GB fast SD and it worked in the first time it booted. Having just booted, some ¨"storage device removed" notification appeared on the Kodi GUI and in the next boot it was again at the same non booting state.

The problem doesn't seem related to the ROM.

I have the same problem, but rarely I get kernel panic.

Most of the time kodi doesn't show up and last line is : Reached target time-sync.target.

ssh doesn't work :

kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer

Connection reset by 192.168.xx.yy port 22

The 16gb sd card is always used with that box and worked fine with older releases.

pastekodi output : http://ix.io/4wgq

After starting kodi from the shell "/usr/lib/kodi/kodi.sh"

and finishing setup I got it working.

Next restart kodi shows up and all is fine.

But "systemctl start kodi" crashes system and ends up with kernel panic.

Quote from chewitt

phemmer Ignoring the obvious I/O errors, the one thing that stands out to me is this:

[ 1.557543] meson_uart c11084c0.serial: Failed to create device link (0x180) with wifi32k

Most of the errors are I/O and look like a dying SD card or perhaps bad PSU that causes instability issues for the (known to be problematically sensitive) MMC devices: SD/eMMC/SDIO. The failure of the wifi32k device to probe right means WiFi (SDIO) will not work, but oddly the other UART based device, BT, appears to proble. Most odd. Another possible cause is the MMC clock speed being too high, but it's only 100MHz (default in the upstream kernel is 50MHz) and it's been stable at that rate with other devices (stats show other U9-H users) so I don't think that's the reason. If the device has been booting CE or Android fine that would generally rule out PSU issues; they would likely show up in other OS too.

Please put this on a new/different SD card https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE….0.2-box.img.gz and see if you can grab the boot log again. I'm not seriously expecting anything to be different but it has some additional patches and a newer kernel than the official release so you never know

I see this exact error on Radxa Zero with AP6212, but did not see it on Radxa Zero 2 with AW-CM256SM. Were you able to fix this issue?

False alert. I pinned the device to another driver. After removing /etc/modprobe.d/bcmdhd.conf I'm good now.

I'm in the UK for a while, so will see if I can find a second-hand U9-H for testing .. no promises.

Quote from TheUndertaker

Hi, first of all, thank you very much for bringing little Minix back to life.

Tried with two SD cards, a slow 2 gb and a fast 128 gb, it doesn't work. It hangs on the Libreelec logo.

With a slow usb of 4 gb and a fast one of 64 gb, both work correctly. Only wifi/bluetooth disappears sometimes but rebooting usually works.

The most curious thing is that with both SD cards, I have used a USB card adapter, and both start correctly.

With my low knowledge it could come from the SD card reader driver.

Second try with 4GB normal TF card indeed works, and my first try with 128GB fast one doesn't.

This is a follow up from RE: My Old Minix Neo U9-H Can Be Updated? which possibly better fits here.

I was just trying to run the latest 11.0.4 on Minix Neo U9-H.

First, booting the default config without any changes gets me into LE screen, then it gets shortly into Kodi screen, then again into LE screen and then gets stuck. It looks like it gets stuck at a point where another poster here got kernel panic. I do not though.

Second, enabling the log into console and sshd (following the advice from RE: My Old Minix Neo U9-H Can Be Updated?) showed that LE gets quite far in the boot process (see the attached pics).

Setting the video mode to suggested video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60 did not work though, I did not get any video output at all. Setting no explicit video or using video=HDMI-A-1:1280x720M@50 seems to work equally well - TV identifies the mode as 720p and shows the aforementioned screens. This is strange because the TV should support 1920x1080p@60Hz (and it indeed does when running the venerable CoreElec version).

What is also strange is when it gets stuck I cannot connect to sshd, but I can ping the box, even though it looks like sshd started correctly, which is confirmed both in the console log and also in a "postmortem analysis" of the SD card, where I can see that the ssh started and the keys were correctly generated in both the log and in /storage/.cache/ssh. But despite the positive indications the box does not respond to ssh request. From /storage/.cache/conman files I can deduct that the wired network was correctly configured by DHCP (also confirmed by ping), so some part of the network stack is running correctly.

When booting with log enabled it also looks like there is a moment (possibly around starting kodi) where it looks like LE/Kodi is trying switching the video mode but failing and continuing with 720p.

After several attempts I manage to record a log from kodi (/storage/.kodi/temp) but it does not seem to indicate anything out of ordinary (

I was thinking about booting LE without starting the kodi, so I can look around more, but to enable that I only find methods which either involve already running LE, or modifying the ext4 filesystem (which I cannot do, as I have only Windows machine at the moment, and only read-only access tool for ext4). Is there a way to disable kodi by modifying uEnv.ini or something else on FAT partition?

Adding "textmode" to kernel boot params in uEnv.ini will boot to a text console (no Kodi) allowing you to poke around. Kodi logs aren't going to be of any use/interest. The systemd journal/dmesg are where any clues might show up.

NB: I've no interest in LE11 codebase for a long time now, so please use the images from my test share instead.

NB: If anyone has a second/spare U9-H box I'd be interested in acquiring it for testing. I've attempted to pick one up on eBay a few times, but I've either been outbid on the item (which is crazy) or sellers have refused to entertain shipping the device to the UAE.

Quote from chewitt

NB: I've no interest in LE11 codebase for a long time now, so please use the images from my test share instead.

Where is your test share and how it differs from LE11 codebase?

Quote from chewitt

NB: If anyone has a second/spare U9-H box I'd be interested in acquiring it for testing. I've attempted to pick one up on eBay a few times, but I've either been outbid on the item (which is crazy) or sellers have refused to entertain shipping the device to the UAE.

I might be able to get one locally on the second hand site and send it to you, but was not able to contact you over PM. Let me know, if you are interested.

https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/ <= Images are based on LE12 which has newer everything including a more recent kernel. The amount of change in the Amlogic kernel is low but that also means it's low risk to use (nothing is likely to be fixed or more broken) but we remove the doubt. And I block PM because far too many users seem to think I provide a personal support service. If you see a U9-H box for sale post publicly here and I will see the post, and can follow-up offline.

chewitt Ok, I will check your builds. Meanwhile I was able to boot into the box, using textmode. It turned out that everything runs fine (without kodi), so I could get dmesg, edid etc.

Once I tried to start kodi (systemctl start kodi) it did not start but led to a quite a lot of filesystem errors in dmesg. I wonder if there is some HW incompatibility between the card and the box. The other suspicious detail is that when LE is starting there is a short moment where the screen looks corrupted (with snowing and vertical lines). I guess it could be related to the gfx init, but I alse wonder if it could be because my box is overclocked (not intentionally, but maybe the default LE freq is too much)?

dmesg output follows (around 512 sec time the errors begin - the time when I started kodi)

cpuinfo

edid

Quote from chewitt

If you see a U9-H box for sale post publicly here and I will see the post, and can follow-up offline.

It is a local (Czech) site, I do not think it is a good idea to post it on an international forum. PM me and I will share it happily.

Quote from chewitt

Images are based on LE12 which has newer everything including a more recent kernel. The amount of change in the Amlogic kernel is low but that also means it's low risk to use (nothing is likely to be fixed or more broken) but we remove the doubt.

Just booted your image (LibreELEC-AMLGX.aarch64-11.80.0-box.img.gz), using ssh textmode kernel boot args.

The behavior is the same as with LE11 - without kodi everything starts up correctly. Once I start kodi from commandline (systemctl start kodi) the kernel log starts to fill with filesystem errors.

dmesg log

[  512.554914] mmc0: card 59b4 removed

^ at that point the system is screwed because the OS is booted from the SD card device; hence all the "EXT4-fs error" messages that are logged. I'm only surprised it doesn't fail more completely/spectacularly.

I have a hunch this is a power problem, but figuring it out might be a challenge. When you start Kodi the GPU is used for the first time which increases power demand on the system. The current assumption is that the box follows the Q200 reference design (the legacy device-tree suggests this: https://github.com/LibreELEC/devi…inix_neo_u9.dts) but there are probably differenes. I do have the schematics for the box, but I'm not the greatest reader of them.

I'll send you a PM re the box.