Rescuing an old AMLogic S912 - which img and dtb?

  • Hello,


    Just found an old generic box that used to run Libreelec-S912-arm-8.2-8.2.2.3.img by kszaq with gxm_q200_3g.dtb (as per some old instructions I found in an email).

    The box doesn't seem to have anything that works installed, just boot loops showing the "AMLogic S912 Cortex-A53 64bit" logo.

    Tried to find the aforementioned versions, as a starter, but the kszaq.libreelec.tv subdomain seems to have vanished.

    Can anyone well versed in these boxes advise me which version of Libreelec I should use and which device tree file?

    The box has 3GB RAM and 1Gbps NIC.

    I see they have changed names and are all prefixed with "meson", closest to the one above seems to be "meson-gxm-q200.dtb".

  • chewitt I may have tried to upgrade coreelec to libreelec by means of dropping the libreelec tarball in the coreelec upgrade dir (failed, obviously).

    Would that be a scenario which messes up u-boot?

  • CE should detect the installed image as "S912.arm" and image to update to as "AMLGX.aarch64" and since they do not match (and you have not manually overriden the update check) the update process should fail with an error message on screen, before erasing the (incorrect) update file and rebooting.

    If you manually start trying to rename files on SD cards then it's possible to break stuff in other ingenious/exciting ways :)

  • Just reporting that burning AMLGX 12.0.0 on a micro sdcard and selecting the meson-gxm-q200.dtb produced a booting environment!

    What I did differently from the initial attempt was to boot the sdcard directly in the unit's slot (as opposed to in an sdcard reader) and also not pressing the reset button.

    I've also renamed the @dtb_file@ or whatever it was called in the env.ini with the actual filename of the dtb.

    Wifi is not working, but apparently this is one of the known problem of these meson dtb..

    PS: I can't seem to be able to paste in this forum's text box! Ctrl+v, middle-click.. nothing works.

  • run "dmesg | paste" and share the URL .. WiFi should work on most devices depending on what chip is inside.

    no issues with copy/paste here (on macOS) /shrug