LibreELEC Bootloop on Raspberry Pi Devices

We have received reports from users of the Kodi Skin Arctic Zephyr: From Ashes which is currently installed on hundreds of thousands of devices were were in fact having issues with being able to run the skin on OSMC, OpenELEC, and LibreELEC. We worked with OSMC to resolve this issue which was featured in their latest update which was released on Sunday.

The problem, as described, is that the three platforms when running on a Raspberry Pi do not protect against invalid access when a skin has no mouse pointer.

We have provided a link to the discussion on OSMC as well as the GitHub fixed link. Since there seems to be no official way to contact LibreELEC which appears to be a fairly small project by comparison to OSMC so we will monitor this thread to see if LibreELEC also corrects the issue:

OSMC: discourse.osmc.tv/t/artic-zephyr-from-ashes-skin-sadface-on-reboot/17042/2
OSMC Github: github.com/popcornmix/xbmc/commit/ce88c8c05c67536577fe1c8bd3279f1a657c1c4e

Please note that is only effects the following platform as far as we are aware of:

• Raspberry Pi
• Kodi Jarvis

Without correcting the issue, users will experience crashes or unexpected bootloops.

We will monitor this topic.

Quote from chewitt

Our fairly small project will resolve this known (as we first flagged it) issue in LE v7.0.2 which will ship fairly soon; within the next week. In the future you can reach our fairly small developer team of ~50 people via any of the ~10 admin or mod staff here in our forums, or by asking the fairly helpful people in the Kodi or OSMC teams where senior LE team members are all fairly well known. Thanks for the report.

While I may have personally disliked the way you responded which may be a result of the way it's written (sometimes text does not come out right compared to speach) we are happy to hear that LibreELEC will be resolving the issue. Do let us know so we may tell our users that another distribution corrected the problem leaving only OpenELEC.

And so that there is no misunderstanding: don't be crass and try to throw around numbers as it's very unprofessional. You should be proud that such a small distribution (as is OpenELEC) is succeding at what it set out to do. OSMC was able to identify and correct the issue through what is apparently a shared common codebase enhancement that had been made by the three distributions.

With that said, we do hope you succede. We weren't going to even contact OpenELEC or you all (LibreELEC) on the basis that both were so small with no real direct points of contact and users were willing to use OSMC instead but we did anyways.

If you do have direct contact information it's very well hidden and if you have direct contact information to OpenELEC that would be appreciated so that we may speak to them as directly if they already haven't corrected the issue.

In either case, good luck with your project.

Quote from Klojum

Actually, I was getting that same feeling about those 'hundreds of thousands of devices' you mentioned. "From Ashes" started begin 2016 as far as I can see, that would mean upto a steady 50,000 devices each month. That's a pretty enthousiastic number.

Except we have the analytical statistics over the course of most of the year to back up such claims. So not enthusiastic but realistic. There's a difference. It's like how you would know 50,000 devices are running LibreELEC. Yes, not an exact science but it's the best we have. The hypothetical 50,000 is of course a number we both just pulled to make a point but we know that LibreELEC only makes up about 0.86% of the From Ashes userbase and OpenELEC smaller than that. OSMC has 2%. Than it's all the usuals such as Android, Windows, normal Linux, OS X, etc.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with you all being a small distribution and that being succesful even in the slightest is still success. The reasons for why one cannot accept a compliment of success even while being small is a reason we don't normally reach out to the smaller distributions.

0.86% is less than 3,000 devices. We're willing to let 3,000 devices go just on the basis of not having to deal with LibreELEC again as it does seem to be more trouble than it's worth to communicate with a smaller group; likely because said smaller groups tend to have a greater attachment to what they put out and don't like to be classified as "small" to begin with even though they are.

Userbase size that is small yet devoted to what you create should be taken as a compliment. Both LibreELEC and OpenELEC are small distributions based on userbase and also based on our information about how our users install the From Ashes skin. To us, that makes you a tiny blip on a radar with far more concerning fish in the sea but to your users you are of course bigger to them even if there are a number that would switch to OSMC if we didn't work it out with the other two distributions.