[9.0.0] LibreELEC builds for MX2/G18

    Quote from chewitt

    Meson 8 hardware like the S812 has a reasonable future once we bump to mainline kernels. There is a lot of IP in common with the newer GX platform so while it's not as popular for development it inherits a lot of support and has an active kernel maintainer (Martin Blumenstingl). The critical missing software component needed for LE to run mainline kernels on S812 is an HDMI driver, and the active plan is to adapt work done for GX boards once it's more feature complete (the HDMI chip is different but we should be able to reuse the core DRM code). Martin has already done some early poking of code but no "video on screen" eureka moment happened yet. LE plans to drop 3.10 kernel support after LE 9.0 ships so there will be a support gap for S802/805/812 devices until an HDMI driver is ready, but I'm cautiously optimistic that something appears before LE10.0. Support can be added back then - although this probably becomes a community effort more than core team effort. Other 3.10 kernel devices using the 8726MX chip (WeTek Play etc.) have no mainline kernel future ahead as Meson 6 has marginal upstream support and nobody working to improve that.

    buzzmarshall On the topic of S912 having no future due to the lack of mali blob .. we've been working on making a lot people eat their hats :)

    See this video from a few days ago: YouTube

    I agree and its to bad because the old 3.10 could have been migrated up to at least 3.14 years ago if Amlogic would have played ball but they are more intent on letting the hackers do all the hard lifting while they gain the market share... There were a few of us years ago trying to talk to Amlogic about support on linux but the interest went ignored by Amlogic till finally enough reviews in mags and other online places seemed to get them to at least open up a little bit but only to a handful of people so most of us just went back to doing our own thing and ignored whats going on in the public. It was a nice thing to see you guys get going as OpenELEC seemed to stagnate as they became more WeTek oriented, which was a really nice boom and appears to continue on in that direction...


    On a Personal note. Amlogic just infuriates me with their attitude towards outsiders and to be honest as far as the box market goes i really think they are some of the worst coders when it comes to supporting their own products and the proof was really apparent when the forced their downstream manufactures to jump up on the bandwagon with the S912 based boxes that used the a Mali core that they themselves refused to licence the DDK leaving the issues the way they are. Even with the canned Android version provided to them those boxes are not really taking advantage of what those SoC's are capable of... for them it was more important to keep their release

    Meanwhile the public is still struggling and Amlogic will leave all the heavy lifting like updating and unifying onto Linux mainstream up to private coders that eventually figure what ends up and either move onto new play toys or become a dealer and do their own thing. Rockchip guys seem to be much more forth-coming with support and help tho which is nice to see, All winner i can't speak much to as i have never played with one.

    Thanx for the heads up tho about Panfrost and Lima as its been awhile since I have looked around as i now have other interests but they look interesting and hopefully will provide some good outcomes. on another note i am actually a bit surprised that 3.14 or higher on the older S8xx boxes have not become a reality because its been done privately for quite some time now but i quess thats what happened when Amlogic ignored all that interest years ago... i don't think Amlogic coders understand or are decent enough Linux coders so they just stick to the canned versions of Android they buy support for.

    Dont get me wrong theres nothing wrong with Android but putting a touch input based OS on a box like this is just more of a novelty then anything but hey, it lets google track everyone and its free. Linux truly is the answer on the boxes and its projects like LIbreELEC and the spin-offs that prove my point... keep up the good work...

    Quote from KOPRajs

    Use the 8.0.2 build from the first post to get Kodi 17.6 on MX2.

    thanks

    being a windows user,

    I used your method 2 and successfully installed "LibreELEC-Amlogic_MX2.arm-8.0.2.zip",

    but I got Kodi 17.3 not 17.6;(

    is it possible to upgrade it to 17.6?

    I would be eternally grateful.

    Ah, I thought it was 17.6. Then I'm afraid there is no build with 17.6 for MX2, sorry. You can try to connect the 17.3 to your SQL server as it should use the same database schema but if it doesn't work then you have to wait until you can update all of your devices to Kodi 18.

    Thank you for keeping this old box alive in 2019. I pulled one out of a closet and was quite pleased to see it could run emulators it had trouble with when it was running Android (Genesis/Mega Drive and Game Boy Advance games never reached full speed).

    Has anyone been able to get MAME or FB Alpha working on this box? The file browser opens up the .zip files rather than handing them off to emulators.

    Quote from KOPRajs

    That's generic Kodi 18 behaviour, you need to unset the file extensions in advancedsettings.xml.

    See here:

    RetroPlayer branch of Kodi

    It is actually fast enough to handle some PSX games with the PCSX-reArmed but don't forget to disable the rewind support in Games menu to get full speed.

    Thanks, problem solved.

    For anyone who wants to play old arcade games, select a zip file with ROMs in the Kodi browser, hold 'ok' on the remote to access the file menu (or right click with a mouse, or hit the menu button on your keyboard if it has one) and select 'play'. That will bring up the emulators menu.

    I don't want to make big promises but I can probably build and test community WP1 and MX2 images until the drop of amcodec in LE10 or at least until the revert of the commit is the only change needed to make it work.

    Edited once, last by KOPRajs (January 28, 2019 at 9:48 AM).

    • Official Post
    Quote from KOPRajs

    I don't want to make big promises but I can probably build and test community WP1 and MX2 images until the drop of amcodec in LE10 or at least until the revert of the commit is the only change needed to make it work.

    Once we bump to mainline kernels and clean up all the old driver packages things will break. Until then most of the 3.10 dependencies are shared with the 3.14 images so it should be a simple revert.

    Hello all

    I've been using libreelec 8.0.2 on my mx2 box (and it's great!)

    But am I missing something?

    Where is the libreelec 9 install from recovery zip file,I would sure like to use the new Kodi 18.

    A updated method of installing libreelec 9 when you have already 8 installed would be great.

    Thanks Marrs

    The newest update files with kodi 18 are on the first page:

    LibreELEC-Amlogic_MX2.arm-9.0.1.tar (for updating exisiting installations, Kodi 18.1).


    If you are on a windows box, open a folder and type \\your.libreelec.boxIP. you should see several folders. Navigate to a folder called "update". Then copy over the tar file. Reboot your box and it should update to kodi 18

    You can find more details here (Update LibreELEC [LibreELEC.wiki]), but basically if you already have the 8.0.2 build working you just need to copy the .tar file to the /storage/.update folder (or to the Update Windows share) and reboot.

    It is always good idea to do a backup before update!

    EDIT: The recovery zip file for MX2 LE 9.0 is currently broken so that's why I only provide the update tar file. There is currently no other way of installing LE 9.0 than installing 8.0.2 and then update to LE 9.0.1 using the tar file.

    Edited 2 times, last by KOPRajs (March 1, 2019 at 1:48 PM).