Unable to boot LE11 on a PI 3A+

    I have spent day trying to install LE11 on my PI 3A+ which has 512mb installed

    but it will not boot, althouth LE10 worked without issue for me, although I only use it for playing music.

    LibreElec starts the splashscreen and then returns:

    "error in mount storage: mount_common".

    and drops you down to a diagnostic screen

    it appears to be something to do with memory as the dmesg output has the following error messages many times over

    "squashfs failed to allocate zstd workspace"

    by changing gpu_mem setting in config.txt from the setting of the issued setting of 76mb upto 256mb i can get it to load to a black screen but nothing else (just thought as i type this perhaps I need to alter hdmi settings to get something to display )

    If i re-image the sdcard and put it in a PI 3B with 1024mb of ram it works perfectly and conversley if I then put this installed sdcard back into the PI 3A+ it fails in exactly the same way.

    Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to solve this problem.

    We stopped formally supporting ARM devices with < 1GB RAM with LE10 as our feeling was the codebase using the newer video pipeline has outgrown 512MB devices and 1GB was the minimum needed for a good user experience. There's been no attempt to actively prevent installs on 512MB devices and stats show some LE10 users have been using it, but it sounds like things finally tipped over the edge.

    The issue is likely to be RAM footprint. You can save memory in a custom image rebuilding the kernel with fewer things enabled (and more use of =m than =y) and disabling services that might not be required; WiFi, BT, Samba, etc. and perhaps experimenting with ZRAM (there's a Pull Requst for that on GitHub). All of them are marginal gains but collectively they might accumulate enough to be meaningful.

    The easier option is repurposing a Model B board with 1GB RAM.

    Keep gpu_mem as it is (76 MB), in addition to that you need to add dtoverlay=cma,cma-256 (or cma.-192) to get it booting.

    Note though that, like on LE10, kodi will then often crash when quickly browsing through the library as it needs a lot of (CMA) memory for pictures.

    so long,

    Hias