Posts by risa2000

Quote from chewitt

Current images have intentionally dropped a load of "WIP" Linux kernel patches because I've had some long periods of downtime on LE during 2024 and I basically forgot what patches were added for what purpose on what device. I have fuzzy recall a change to SD/emmc speeds is needed for U9-H, but I'll need to poke around in old kernel trees.

NB: I don't think the panfrost error is itself important, it's most likely a casualty of overall OS instability caused by the I/O issues.

FWIW you managed to fix the SD card problem with Samsung "high performance" cards in LE12 testing image already, but at that time I used 32GB card. Now it was failing with 256GB card, so maybe it was fixed for the voltage/clock, but did not work for the capacity being too large?

Anyway I never manage to make LE12 running on my U9-H to my satisfaction (tried only few times), had problems with live TV (TVHeadend) and stuttering.

Quote from chewitt

The number of users that show up with an Argon case and swear it cannot possibly be their magic/favourite case; who then go quiet after we insist they remove the board and test playback without it .. is notable. So, remove the board and test.

That seems to be next logical step. Unfortunately I do not have a micro HDMI cable at hand at the moment and I get to testing this only few times a year when visiting my dad. And I won``'t get a new cable before I leave. So I if I go silent, it was not because I got faulty Argon case.

I did few more tests since the issue is still there (with LE 12.0.1). Apparently it does not depend on the video content/format. Just switching the Kodi UI to 2160p has exactly the same effect - the TV switches into 4K, and Kodi outputs its UI into the top left quadrant at 1080p.

I just got a new Google TV Streamer so I could verify that the HDMI port/setting on the TV and the cable are not a problem, with the Streamer switching to 4K@60Hz with both SDR and HDR content without a hitch.

I recorded a log from "video", "audio" and "D-bus" components, not sure it helps though:

It captures changing the UI resolution from 1080p@100Hz to 2160p@30Hz and back again when the "accept the new resolution" dialog times out. When in 4K mode, the Kodi System Info reports correctly that the resolution is indeed 2160p@30Hz - full screen. Just the UI is rendered in 1080p into the top left quadrant.

Just to note: the EGL_BAD_SURFACE error seems to be present at every resolution change (even those that work correctly).

So if anyone has an idea, what might be wrong, I am all ears.

FWIW I just tried the latest testing img 12.80 on my Minix U9-H and got two errors.

https://pastebin.com/raw/uE2wqUAe

I suspect the file system errors are because of my SD card (Samsung 256GB). I guess this might not be supported by the HW, but unfortunately I do not have other SD card at hand.

Whether these FS problems have caused also the panfrost error I do not know.

The system seemed to boot fine in textmode and ssh and only after I run systemctl start kodi it went south (60th second of dmesg). Kodi did not start complaining about not being able to create /storage/.kodi dir, which was probably related to already borked FS.

Quote from chewitt

Please share a debug log that demonstrates the problem. Thanks.

Not sure what to log I chose "video" and "video and audio timing" in "components" list. I just tried to start playing the file (which was 4K HEVC mov created by me) and when the playback started and it was obvious it was wrong I stopped it. Then I stopped the logging.

Quote from Da Flex

So enable "Adjust Refresh".

"Adjust Refresh" is, following the advice in the same wiki, set to "On Start/Stop".

Quote from chewitt

Please share a debug log that demonstrates the problem. Thanks.

I am currently only able to access the box remotely, so will have to see, if I could enable and replicate this somehow.

Quote from MatteN

Under the years i have used Pi4 with LE and LG Oled something similar happened only once and it went away when i replaced the HDMIcable.

There is one tricky thing I did not fully realize - I am using Argon case with SSD port. I had to originally replace the board with HDMI convertors because one did not work. Then I read here that Argon cases are not very reliable with respect to HDMI. So I wonder if this might be a culprit.

So far my reasoning about this not being the cable (or the HDMI output itself) is that apparently the TV switches into right res (4K), but for some reason Kodi turns on the downsampling anyway. I would expect if the hw negotiation of 4K mode fails, it would not switch into it in the first place.

I am experiencing a strange "bug" with Kodi 4K rendering on RPi4b. It did not work in LE v11, and still does not work in LE v12.

I have LG OLED C1 and Kodi user interface set to be rendered in 1920x1080@100Hz. I have however whitelisted all 4K modes (as per wiki https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/4k-hdr#id-4k-60hz) and all Full HD modes.

Now, when playing 4K content (SDR, HEVC) the TV switches into 4K mode, but the movie is rendered in what seems to be a Full HD res (1920x1080) into the first quadrant. If I un-whitelist the 4K modes, the TV does not switch into 4K mode and the movie is again rendered in Full HD res correctly (and upsampled to 4K by TV). So it looks, like for some reason Kodi downsamples the content regardless the mode the TV is in.

This is how it looks:

I could have missed something fundamental in Kodi settings, but after several reviews I am still clueless. Anyone has any insight?

Quote from chewitt

risa2000 Interesting. Nice to see the errors are gone. The log also shows Broadcom WiFi is now missing but I suspect that's due to another change I made. Can you update to https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…h64-11.80.0.tar and share the boot log to confirm (it should be fixed if I'm right)?

I noticed wifi was missing, was thinking it was because I had already wired connection :). The new build fixes that. Here is dmesg log, there are some video errors at the end, but I am not sure if they are relevant (I observed some instability when watching TV or TV recordings from TVHeadend backend).

I also noticed that in this build kodi run correctly 1920x1200p@60Hz.

Quote from chewitt

Purely for kicks can you update to the latest https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…h64-11.80.0.tar and share a new dmesg log please. I've described all SD card modes in device-tree and increased the max SD card speed. On most hardware i'd expect this to cause problems, but I'm curious to see what impact/influence it has (not sure it can make things worse).

The latest build from today seems to work fine with Samsung SD card (I flashed the image anew, to avoid risking having corrupted fs from the previous run). Here is the dmesg:

There is actually nothing particular about kodi start in the log. Only, after starting kodi I have connected Air Mouse which is registered at the end of dmesg.

Quote from chewitt

Amlogic mmc controller issues normally exhibit with high-speed card modes and faster speeds and the current/upstream U9-H device-tree is already defeatured to run at a minimum level. The usual way to rule out those issues with modern cards (that have fancy modes and such) is to test with an old, slow, low-capacity card. I have some 2GB cards which aren't much use for an install but are reliable for that kind of testing. Most vendor firmware will power-up the USB section in u-boot automatically which will make the AMLGX boot media discoverable and useable there too, so perhaps try with a USB stick instead of SD card.

I got my hands on another Minix Neo U9-H, and run it with your latest test build and observed the same behavior. It booted alright in textmode and then got stuck with a lot filesystem errors when I started kodi.

Which at least ruled out that my original box had some hardware/power supply problem.

Then I tried to boot from a quite old USB stick instead (8GB SLC rarity) and it booted fine and run kodi fine. So the culprit is the Samsung SD card: https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/memory-cards/pro-endurance-adapter-microsdxc-32gb-mb-mj32ka-am/

I wonder how to figure out which cards/USB sticks are fine.

Quote from chewitt

I have a hunch this is a power problem, but figuring it out might be a challenge. When you start Kodi the GPU is used for the first time which increases power demand on the system. The current assumption is that the box follows the Q200 reference design (the legacy device-tree suggests this: https://github.com/LibreELEC/devi…inix_neo_u9.dts) but there are probably differenes. I do have the schematics for the box, but I'm not the greatest reader of them.

FWIW CoreElec 9.2.8 which I run currently claims to use dt-id: gxm_q200_2g_minix_neo_u9 which I would assume is the same device tree LE is using. I have checked the power supply, it gives 5V, looks solid. My hunch about overclocking might as well be undervolting though. I tried looking into any hint from comparing dmesg outputs from LE and CE, but these differ so much that I am clueless.

The last thing I wonder if might be an issue is the SD card and its potential incompatibility with the Minix. For LE I am using a different SD card (32GB Samsung) from the one I am using with CE (16GB Transcend).

chewitt Ok, I will check your builds. Meanwhile I was able to boot into the box, using textmode. It turned out that everything runs fine (without kodi), so I could get dmesg, edid etc.

Once I tried to start kodi (systemctl start kodi) it did not start but led to a quite a lot of filesystem errors in dmesg. I wonder if there is some HW incompatibility between the card and the box. The other suspicious detail is that when LE is starting there is a short moment where the screen looks corrupted (with snowing and vertical lines). I guess it could be related to the gfx init, but I alse wonder if it could be because my box is overclocked (not intentionally, but maybe the default LE freq is too much)?

dmesg output follows (around 512 sec time the errors begin - the time when I started kodi)

cpuinfo

edid

Quote from chewitt

If you see a U9-H box for sale post publicly here and I will see the post, and can follow-up offline.

It is a local (Czech) site, I do not think it is a good idea to post it on an international forum. PM me and I will share it happily.

Quote from chewitt

Images are based on LE12 which has newer everything including a more recent kernel. The amount of change in the Amlogic kernel is low but that also means it's low risk to use (nothing is likely to be fixed or more broken) but we remove the doubt.

Just booted your image (LibreELEC-AMLGX.aarch64-11.80.0-box.img.gz), using ssh textmode kernel boot args.

The behavior is the same as with LE11 - without kodi everything starts up correctly. Once I start kodi from commandline (systemctl start kodi) the kernel log starts to fill with filesystem errors.

dmesg log

Quote from chewitt

NB: I've no interest in LE11 codebase for a long time now, so please use the images from my test share instead.

Where is your test share and how it differs from LE11 codebase?

Quote from chewitt

NB: If anyone has a second/spare U9-H box I'd be interested in acquiring it for testing. I've attempted to pick one up on eBay a few times, but I've either been outbid on the item (which is crazy) or sellers have refused to entertain shipping the device to the UAE.

I might be able to get one locally on the second hand site and send it to you, but was not able to contact you over PM. Let me know, if you are interested.

This is a follow up from RE: My Old Minix Neo U9-H Can Be Updated? which possibly better fits here.

I was just trying to run the latest 11.0.4 on Minix Neo U9-H.

First, booting the default config without any changes gets me into LE screen, then it gets shortly into Kodi screen, then again into LE screen and then gets stuck. It looks like it gets stuck at a point where another poster here got kernel panic. I do not though.

Second, enabling the log into console and sshd (following the advice from RE: My Old Minix Neo U9-H Can Be Updated?) showed that LE gets quite far in the boot process (see the attached pics).

Setting the video mode to suggested video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60 did not work though, I did not get any video output at all. Setting no explicit video or using video=HDMI-A-1:1280x720M@50 seems to work equally well - TV identifies the mode as 720p and shows the aforementioned screens. This is strange because the TV should support 1920x1080p@60Hz (and it indeed does when running the venerable CoreElec version).

What is also strange is when it gets stuck I cannot connect to sshd, but I can ping the box, even though it looks like sshd started correctly, which is confirmed both in the console log and also in a "postmortem analysis" of the SD card, where I can see that the ssh started and the keys were correctly generated in both the log and in /storage/.cache/ssh. But despite the positive indications the box does not respond to ssh request. From /storage/.cache/conman files I can deduct that the wired network was correctly configured by DHCP (also confirmed by ping), so some part of the network stack is running correctly.

When booting with log enabled it also looks like there is a moment (possibly around starting kodi) where it looks like LE/Kodi is trying switching the video mode but failing and continuing with 720p.

After several attempts I manage to record a log from kodi (/storage/.kodi/temp) but it does not seem to indicate anything out of ordinary (

I was thinking about booting LE without starting the kodi, so I can look around more, but to enable that I only find methods which either involve already running LE, or modifying the ext4 filesystem (which I cannot do, as I have only Windows machine at the moment, and only read-only access tool for ext4). Is there a way to disable kodi by modifying uEnv.ini or something else on FAT partition?

Hmm, I found another thread which seems to be addressing my issue - I will eventually respond there:
Minix U9-H freeze on kodi loading page / black screen

chewitt

Alright. I will see if I could catch something with the new config. Might be a while before I get to it though. Thanks for the help.

chewitt

Thanks for the tips! It seemed stuck for a long time and the kodi log got created so I would hope it reached userspace (unless the kodi runs in some other mode). The video might be a problem as the TV is an old Panasonic plasma with native res 1280x720 ("HD ready"), it should be able to run Full HD (1920x1080) up to 60Hz but the EDID might not be "up to date".

Coming to the repetitive reboot with power button down, do you if it is an expected behavior? For example if the power button is mapped to "reset" on LE and activates at the very first moment?

On CoreElec when booting with the power button down, it flashes the Minix screen shortly but then goes directly into CE boot and remains there until it fully boots, regardless how long I keep the button pressed.

I was trying to breath the new life to my venerable Minix Neo U9-H with the latest LibreElec. So far the thing was running CoreElec 9.2.8 without problems, so I have good reason to believe that the hardware is fine.

First thing I noticed when trying to boot LE from an SD card was that in order to be able to switch to the new SD card (by booting while keeping power button) the device had to be shut down properly before. Which is possible either from the native Android or from the CE by using some menu commands, but does not work if I just power cycled the device in sleep mode. I do not remember if it was a normal behavior, but since I did not know (or did not remember) I thought that maybe my SD card install is not correct, or the power button trick did not work anymore - anyway it scared me especially since it started to behave the same way even for the old SD card with CE install.

The recovery was to remove SD card, boot the original Firmware, use the menu command to shut it down properly then disconnect the power, put the SD card in, push the power button and plug the power.

The second thing I am not sure was right, while booting the card with LE and still keeping the power button down, it looked like the boot was locked in a loop. The first LE screen showed up, then the screen blacked out, then again as long as I kept the button down. Once I released the button, it showed the LE screen with the text LibreElec and version at the top left corner, then Kodi booting screen showed up and then it got stuck.

Since I read about some extensive booting time mentioned by OP here, I left it conservatively for maybe 10 minutes, but it did not budge from the Kodi screen.

The problem is that I do not have the device at my place and have typically just limited time for playing with it, so I need to prepare myself in advance. I have checked the both filesystems on the card (FAT and Ext4) but did not find any log (`.kodi/temp/kodi.log apparently got created but is empty).

Is there a way to instrument the boot to get any diagnostics either into console or recorded onto SD card?