AMLGX for Q96max (S905L)

    Specs of the "Q96max":

    - CPU S905L (most likely -B revision @ 1.5GHz)

    - Board p201 (HDMI, 2x USB2, "AV", IR receiver, LED)

    - RAM 1GB, Flash 8GB eMMC ("Kingston M72808", not verified)

    - LAN 10/100mbit

    - WiFi 2.4GHz only (ssv6200 SDIO, using SSV6051P driver, reported chip id RSV6200A0-201311)

    Using LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-11.0.0-box (after a reboot update command), results depending on device tree, best to worse:

    - meson-gxl-s905x-p212 -- 1GB, no WiFi, audio seems to get stuck sometimes

    - meson-gxl-s905l-venz-v10 -- 1GB, no WiFi, audio seems to get stuck sometimes

    - meson-gxbb-p201 -- doesn't boot at all

    I haven't checked remote, LAN, LED in LibreElec yet.

    It's pre-loaded with Android 7.1. I have captured dmesg and a dump of /dev/dtb and /proc/device-tree and can upload these if necessary. The case doesn't look easy to open so no pictures of the board, sorry. Android uses ssv6051 module for WiFi. dmesg prints out "SSV WLAN driver ssv6200".


    Questions:

    (1) Is this generally the right image to start with, or is there something more suitable?

    (2) I saw "No support for SSV6501" in the release notes - is this the same as ssv6051 or a typo or same family?

    (3) It seems that I might need to create a more specific device tree (i.e. meson-gxl-s905l-p201-2gb), and maybe install a kernel module for the WiFi. Any pointers on how to get started with these?

    (4) Anything else I can provide?

    Cheers!

    Edited 2 times, last by thielj: updated specs (April 23, 2023 at 3:08 PM).

    S905L is an S905X without VP9 support, 10/100 Ethernet, no BT, and faked 2GHz CPU (all GXL boards are 1.5GHz). There is no direct support in the upstream kernel but differences from S905X are minor so creating a custom device-tree shouldn't be hard; I started to look at changes for the Venz V10 - though that user disappeared so progress stalled. NB: The current hardware decode drivers assume all GXL boards support VP9 so attempting VP9 media playback will result in blank screens in Kodi.

    P201 is a GXBB (S905) device-tree; hence it will not boot a GXL (S905X) derived device. SSV6200 is a newer variant of the SSV6051 chip and also not supported. The SSV vendor drivers are horrific quality (achieving new depths of bad) and do not compile against an upstream kernel, only the vendor kernels. No support means no support.

    If you can provide me with the Android dtb file and dmesg boot log, and a working remote control config, I can look at adding support.

    Hi chewitt apologies for the late reply. Life got into the way.

    Attached are the dmesg log and the dtb.img. I didn't save the remote config, but will do next time I hook it up.

    Hope this helps. These boxes currently sell in the thousands on Ali, sometimes below $10, with the usual inflated/fake specs.

    Also, some boxes have the P201 board, others the P281. The website I linked in the next post lists different stock firmware dumps.

    Quote from chewitt

    SSV6200 is a newer variant of the SSV6051 chip and also not supported. The SSV vendor drivers are horrific quality (achieving new depths of bad) and do not compile against an upstream kernel, only the vendor kernels. No support means no support.

    I might got this wrong, but it looks like there is a "armbian mainline" driver available now for supporting RK based boards:

    rockchip64: add ssv6051p wifi driver for current and edge kernel by paolosabatino · Pull Request #4269 · armbian/build
    Description ssv6051p is found as cheap wifi/802.11n only on some older rk3328 boards; some community members asked for it and here it is. Also make some…
    github.com

    I'm aware of that effort and have spoken with the authors. To simplify the codebase needed for it to work on RK hardware they removed all the Amlogic support code so it remains a dead-end. And even on RK hardware the results aren't great (so they've said).