LE13 Testing for RK3288, RK3328, RK3399, RK3566, RK3568, RK3576, RK3588

  • Things work better on LE due to the OS being overall lighter and because Kodi setup with adjust-refresh and whitelists etc. requires less compute resources during playback than a desktop app under wayland that's forced to resample audio and video to run at the desktop rate of 1080@60Hz or 4K@60Hz.

    The buffer size issue is the main thing to focus on for VDPU346. The VP9 patches seem to work well and I'm coaching Abhi Sarma on kernel etiquette so hopefully a v1 series can be sent for review soon.

    The minor tearing/glitches that can be seen when the Kodi OSD is active are the result of refactoring in the ffmpeg patches (dealing with ffmpeg developer feedback/requirements) and additional work in Kodi is needed to get back to the previous state where there were no artefacts. More patch series need to be merged down, then some effort can go into investigating that.

  • Test share images are updated with Linux 6.19-rc6 and a notable fix to gracefully handle uninitialised values during HEVC decoding which helps with 4K media files that spammed the system log with errors. I'm now able to play all the HEVC media in my test-file collection which includes a number of known-bad files. Playback of those sometimes takes 10-15 seconds to start, depending on the underlying kind of broken, but even those play which is great. That fix (the result of AI analysis of kernel splats) also pointed fingers to some related code that can be improved to not allow the uninitialised values in the first-place, so we should see some additional fixes on the mailing-list in the next week.

    At this point the only things I feel are missing from RK3588 are HDR and hardware deinterlacing. The former will eventually happen through work Collabora are doing. Nobody is handling the latter though.

    I'm back to buffer size AI guesswork and nagging Jonas to review old patches for older hardware so we can get closer to a unified kernel source for aarch64 boards.

  • chewitt updated to the new nightly (r6s) and it booted to a large mouse cursor in the top left which disappeared into a black screen. Had to ssh in and systemctl start/restart kodi.service, which was preset: disabled (not by me).

  • There is no underlying desktop environment in LibreELEC so if you saw a mouse cursor on-screen Kodi started. If the home screen did not then show, the kodi.log (hopefully a debug one) and/or the systemd journal might have clues. This is probably past-tense though and I've not seen anything similar; other than the Kodi database upgrade screen. NB: I'm not aware of anything in images that would result in kodi.service being disabled.

  • axel I've spoken to Radxa about the AIC8800 wireless chip a couple of months ago as it's also fitted to one the boards I've been using to test. Radxa have no plans to upstream the driver as this would require a large effort, i.e. complete rewrite as the current quality of driver code would never be accepted into the kernel, and after years of working to rid our codebase of the maintenance burden of downstream (mostly Realtek) drivers we have no desire to add technical dept in the form of another vendor driver that has no plan to be upstreamed. I've shared our surprise/annoyance and position, and have strongly suggested they stick to using Broadcom, Qualcomm, Realtek (now upstream) chips in future iterations of current boards and future board designs so distros can avoid the need for crap drivers. I'm not sure LibreELEC's opinion will carry much commercial weight with them, but from our side, there's no action to be taken.

    Thanks for the detailed answer, it's appreciated. I understand and support your position, from a LE project perspective.

    From a "how do i get this device to do what i want" perspective, it sounds like i need to learn to build LE and add the driver in my image, to get it to get usable wifi? or add an external wifi adaptor, which is a lot simpler, a bit sad considering it has onboard wifi, and not as fun (probably type-2 fun though, lets' be honest). Or run Armbian / Radxa Debian and make it boot into Kodi.

  • ...it sounds like i need to learn to build LE and add the driver in my image, to get it to get usable wifi?

    Kermit_Protocol
    August 31, 2023 at 11:05 PM
  • From a "how do i get this device to do what i want" perspective, it sounds like i need to learn to build LE and add the driver in my image, to get it to get usable wifi? or add an external wifi adaptor, which is a lot simpler, a bit sad considering it has onboard wifi, and not as fun (probably type-2 fun though, lets' be honest). Or run Armbian / Radxa Debian and make it boot into Kodi.

    Regarding this, my post will help with your image building LE I think.

    Yasai-san
    September 22, 2025 at 12:42 PM

    But I don't create Pull requests for AIC8800 driver because I'm agree with chewitt and LibreELEC perspective.