Does LibreELEC or JeOS support the HISilicon chip?

    Quote from spitzbube

    Hi all,

    I initially created the OpenELEC port to Hisilicon Hi398CV100 in github in the beginning of 2016.

    Unfortunately I was very busy since then and I also saw that the successor Hi3798CV200 is more often used in newer boxes. I never bought such a new box but it was always my goal to make a similar port of OE to the new processor.

    It seems that LE has now got more attraction. Maybe I will try to build it first for my old CV100 box.

    Hi spitzbube,

    I've stumbled over the Dinobot 4k (Hi3798MV200) and Dinobot 4k SE (Hi3798CV200) boxes by accident and found them interesting as they would allow me to continue using Enigma2 software for TV&PVR stuff and to use Android for some DRM protected streaming services like DAZN. Using Kodi / SPMC on Android should work too, but my first thought was if LibreELEC would work on one of these boxes as well.

    I was a bit "disappointed" when I found out, that LibreELEC dosn't support HiSilicon chips / devices. Although 2-3 years ago there was an OpenELEC image for the previous model, according to the manufacturer. It wasn't quite ready though, but still.

    Then I found this thread and your post and the hope increased a bit again. From what I've read here, Kodi 18 as base should make it easier than before. So I just wanted to ask, if you are still interested and motivated to give the HiSilicon support a go?

    • Official Post

    HiSilicon appears to have reasonable mainline kernel support and we are always interested in seeing LE run on new hardware, but so far nobody in the community leapt at the opportunity to spend lots of hours figuring out how to make that happen. The current dev team has its hands full so for HiSilicon support to happen someone needs to volunteer themselves. If not we'll get there eventually.. but no timescales.

    Quote from shad

    Hi spitzbube,

    I've stumbled over the Dinobot 4k (Hi3798MV200) and Dinobot 4k SE (Hi3798CV200) boxes by accident...

    So I just wanted to ask, if you are still interested and motivated to give the HiSilicon support a go?

    Yes I am still interested in development for the newer Hisi boxes. Recently I was even able to re-build the OpenaTV image from the sources for the Dinobot 4K SE. Especially I wanted to find out from where the kernel (sources) come and what about the Hisilicon drivers.

    Having these available is important also for creating a LibreElec image for Hisi.

    Unfortunately I was not yet lucky to get one of the Hi3798CV200 based boxes. At the moment I try to build the recent Hisilicon kernel (provided in sources for the Poplar board) for one of my boxes based on the old HI3716CV200. And after this I will try to add user space either from OpenaTV or LibreELEC.

    Quote from spitzbube

    Yes I am still interested in development for the newer Hisi boxes. Recently I was even able to re-build the OpenaTV image from the sources for the Dinobot 4K SE. Especially I wanted to find out from where the kernel (sources) come and what about the Hisilicon drivers.

    Having these available is important also for creating a LibreElec image for Hisi.

    Unfortunately I was not yet lucky to get one of the Hi3798CV200 based boxes. At the moment I try to build the recent Hisilicon kernel (provided in sources for the Poplar board) for one of my boxes based on the old HI3716CV200. And after this I will try to add user space either from OpenaTV or LibreELEC.

    We produced Dinobot boxes. Maybe we can work together.

    • Official Post

    I haven't looked deeply into HiSilicon requirements, but for anything vaguely official to go into LE's github repo (even as an experimental branch) the technical direction needs to be mainline kernel/uboot with DRM/GBM for rendering and a V4L2 (integrated with ffmpeg) driver to create a zero-copy (mem2mem) graphics pipeline. We have learned from our experiences of Amlogic and Rockchip. As long as those criteria are followed and/or there is a clear plan/vision on how to get there .. we're all ears.

    • Official Post

    leandrotsampa It looks like you are hacking a vendor-proprietary rendering system into Kodi similar to Amcodec, iMX6, etc. which have now been exorcised from the codebase. If HiSilicon have V4L2 support, this is the technical direction to invest time into, as your current approach will not be accepted upstream.

    Quote from chewitt

    leandrotsampa It looks like you are hacking a vendor-proprietary rendering system into Kodi similar to Amcodec, iMX6, etc. which have now been exorcised from the codebase. If HiSilicon have V4L2 support, this is the technical direction to invest time into, as your current approach will not be accepted upstream.

    Yes, if have v4l2 but you think hisilicon will release this support?

    For put this in upstream need use direct kernel driver, and I not will port this for now.

    So, it's decoding very good for me and I can view 4K without any problem.