Posts by frakkin64

  • Radxa Zero - Amlogic 905Y2 - wifi network in librelec

    brcmfmac appears to already configured as a module on the Amlogic kernel. might want to post logs/dmesg output.

    CONFIG_BRCMFMAC=m

    CONFIG_BRCMFMAC_SDIO=y

    It looks like firmware may be missing, this is what Armbian uses:


    brcmfmac: F1 signature read @0x18000000=0x15294345

    brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_alloc_request: using brcm/brcmfmac43456-sdio for chip BCM4345/9

    brcmfmac mmc2:0001:1: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43456-sdio.radxa,zero.bin failed with error -2

    brcmfmac mmc2:0001:1: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43456-sdio.radxa,zero.txt failed with error -2


    You can pull the brcmfmac43456-sdio* firmware files from https://github.com/armbian/firmware/tree/master/brcm and drop them in

    /storage/.config/firmware/brcm


    And see what happens. The comment in GitHub suggests the files were contributed to Armbian by LibreELEC, so it might be something in the pipeline.

    Edit: BTW, Pretty sure now firmware & module is there. So I think you would need to post dmesg output, or test the latest nightly?

  • Your thoughts on the future of Raspberry Pi as a LE platforrm

    Quote from twilightened

    Countries like USA and UK have strong currencies so they probably will feel it less but developing countries like my own "Turkey" are already receiving big blows.

    Ahh, being in the US haven't considered this. But noticing a lot more posts on r/homelab on reddit about the prices of Raspberry Pi 4 and whether it is worth using for homelabs. I primarily just use it as a media device w/ LE on it, and use my x86_64 box for everything else -- but I guess people like to use them for "server" things which perplexes me.

    Can a Pi be used to run a NAS? Sure, but why? Buy an LSI PCI card and you have 8 PCIe lanes, one for each SATA device, maximum bandwidth to saturate the SATA link.

    IIRC, USB 3 on a Pi 4 is shared or constrained, so you don't get the full bandwidth -- could be wrong. I know the internal Wi-Fi is constrained by the SDIO bus. All things done to hit a price point and is honestly adequate for most basic users. So the whole NAS thing with Pi's really baffles me.

    I guess the rambling point I was making is they are excellent devices for LE. Compact, fanless, does the job, really perfect in my book.

  • Libreelec nfs shares

    If you want meaningful help then you would have to upload logs.

    https://wiki.libreelec.tv/support/log-files


    I would try to ssh into the device, and check your network configuration by running these two commands:

    ifconfig

    route -n

    Check your NFS device is resolvable & pingable using the ping command. If you used a hostname in your sources entry, then I would use that with the ping command.

    If you do not need NFS mounted on the device, then I personally would just use Kodi's "add video source" and choose the NFS option:

    Adding video sources - Official Kodi Wiki

    Generally the URL is something like this in the sources.xml:

    Code
            <source>
            <name>Movies</name>
            <path pathversion="1">nfs://kodi-fs1/srv/media/movies/</path>
            <allowsharing>true</allowsharing>
        </source>

    By the way, if you can't access the device via the network, then that is likely the issue. Not knowing more about the hardware only leads to speculation, but it's possible the network devices in the device are not supported.

  • Raspberry Pi 4 RAM benefits?

    Quote from HiassofT

    Kodi has rather long standing and yet unresolved issues with image handling (eg with pictures but also movie etc artwork) and is consuming too much (graphics) memory - which often leads to out-of-memory crashes.

    Is that what the individual 4kb mmap'd /dev/dri/renderD128 pages are all about in pmap? I noticed that with LE 10, and wondered what was going on there.

    00000000f2e6a000 4 0 0 0 rw-s /dev/dri/renderD128

    00000000f2e6b000 4 0 0 0 rw-s /dev/dri/renderD128

    00000000f2e6c000 4 0 0 0 rw-s /dev/dri/renderD128

  • Raspberry Pi 4 RAM benefits?

    I typically use the 2GB model with LE 11, no issues. Typically Kodi is only sitting around 600MB of memory usage. I know this comes up from time to time, and some folks recommend 4GB as well.

    I would say it's almost about what you can get, and I know that Sparkfun does sell bare boards and they do come up for backorder periodically (you have to keep checking, might take a month or two for them to be available for backorder). I ordered 2 boards on backorder about 5 months ago and received them recently.

    I swear I also read over on the Pi Forums that the 2GB model is the one that has the higher sales volume, so they manufacture more of them -- but I could be remembering that wrong as well. They don't really publish their sales numbers, but I recall one of the engineers mentioned something along those lines. It somewhat makes sense considering the devices are popular in industrial, maker-space, education, etc and most of those embedded uses likely require far less than 2GB.

    If you intend to run a desktop (i.e. Raspberry Pi OS) as a dual boot or mixed used device or what to guard against the future, then I would say 4GB is worth the extra $10. Software bloat does happen, but I am personally hedging on that will be many many years down the road (based on my current use case) and I would have moved on by then.

    Anyways, the choice is yours. I can't really speak to any tangible benefits for 4GB/8GB for LE. I have an 8GB, but it runs Raspberry Pi OS as a desktop.

  • RPi4 & HDD corruption

    Quote from LybsterKodi

    Its definitely how I'm shutting down - just flip the power switch.

    Yeah, that will do it. Not surprised to be honest. But with that being said, so filesystems support mount options to force synchronous writes (which may be why exFAT is working, perhaps the default behavior):

    Quote

    sync

    All I/O to the filesystem should be done synchronously. In the case

    of media with a limited number of write cycles (e.g. some flash

    drives), sync may cause life-cycle shortening.

    Not sure if this is available for ntfs3 (it is a "common option" for all filesystems, so assuming it influences the OS cache), and the other thing to consider is disk-side write caching (but I think those might have power loss detection circuitry to flush that cache to disk, but not sure on that, hdparm usually can control that -- not sure if it is relevant for USB, honestly never had to do this).

  • RPi4 & HDD corruption

    Quote from LybsterKodi

    I've only tried NTFS and Ext4 so far. ExFAT is supposed to be less robust than NTFS but I'll have a go. The thing that's really baffling me is why I get this on the RPi4 setup but not the RPi3.

    Maybe describe your setup in more detail, and how your shutting down. I don't routinely use external disks as everything is on a NAS via NFS, but I have used a USB-configuration with an NTFS disk when I am taking movies/shows on vacation and never had this problem with a RPi4.

    I don't see advanced settings having any bearing on this problem [they are really about video playback read caching]. As I understand it the source of corruption (or I guess what is corrupted) is written through the Samba service. It might also be good to describe the corruption, what your doing, what is happening, when it happens. Corruption is a bit non-descriptive, there is a lot that could be interpreted as corruption.

    It could be hardware, it could be how your shutting down, it could be that the shutdown is actually hanging (i.e. disk buffers are not flushed). But the short story is that Linux, if properly shutdown, will flush disk buffer caches to disk. It's been a while, but Linux used to even mention it something like "Syncing disks" and then "Power down" or "System halted", but most computers nowadays automatically power off so you hardly notice these messages on console.

  • Force Raspberry Pi 4B 5 GHz WiFi

    Quote from B4N3

    I wondered what is the case and i ran into the 2.4 GHz bug

    The bug was fixed 3 years ago, LE10 already has the later firmware. As for 5GHz, it already will pick it automatically, not sure what the criteria is but it may be signal strength. In my case, it works fine out of the box:

    # iw wlan0 info |grep channel

    channel 149 (5745 MHz), width: 80 MHz, center1: 5775 MHz


    It's possible your problem is buffer cache related, but I guess if this solved it then great. 5GHz will be a bit less congested, but I doubt it will solve any bandwidth problems on the Pi4 if that is the cause of your original problem.

  • MariaDB add-on, Docker containers - is it safe to backup while running?

    Quote from Marius95

    I'm worried that a backup made while SQL databases are being written will contain corrupted database files, and possibly other problems related to files being backed up while in an inconsistent state.

    SQL databases especially, depending on the configuration there can be data loss as it is not unusual to hold changes into a buffer cache and write them to disk later. Typically I do a backup with mysqldump (as a hot backup) and as chewitt mentioned the changes to the Kodi db are pretty low volume. Since my backups are daily there could be up to 24h of data loss, but really the only loss for me is watch counts as the data comes from NFO files on the sources.

    I would investigate each applications backup options, and follow their guidance. This may mean you need to write a cron script and use "docker exec" to run the backup command in the running container. You will need to adjust your docker configuration to probably include some volume for storing backups.

  • Raspberry Pi4 problem with one particular 1080i OTA TV Station (Solved)

    Quote from jmooremcc

    I'm in the Miami Florida USA area and one of the local 1080i TV stations somehow put in the European frame rate of 25 fps in their metadata instead of the ATSC standard 29.97 fps.

    I can receive most of the major stations from Miami, haven't noticed a problem and they all seem to be reporting 29.97 for 1080i stations (WPBT, WFOR, WTVJ, WPLG, WLRN, WAMI). I know there are a few LP stations that I can't receive, and those are always a bit questionable. :)

    In terms of settings, found these work best:

    https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/4k-hdr

    They may be talking about 4K/HDR, but a lot of it is relevant for a 1080 FHD television as well.

  • Venz V10 (S905L) Bring Up

    Quote from bertiera

    hmmm, my mistake probably, I have to admit I didn't try, but I do remember I read it under somewhere at the end of some Release-notification. Probably it's my mistake, and I misunderstood the information about the new amlogic-ng builds...

    Thanks for correcting my statement, I'll give it a try.

    Yeah, CE works fine on gxl. I was running CE on my gxl (Vero 4K+/S905D 2GBe) device via SD card. Early on in the the 19 cycle they were missing some reserved memory and some of the gxl devices wouldn't start Kodi, but that was fixed about 8 or 9 months ago.

    I am just using OSMC on that device (which is what it comes with, since it's an OSMC branded device), and testing LE via SD card. But something is hosed up with YouTube on LE 20, and haven't had time to dig into it, which 80% of what I watch is YouTube on that device. :)

  • Block Russian + Byelorussian IP ranges

    Quote from ciberboy

    What I'm exposing are torrents. I am fully aware that there multiple ways to mask your IP, but at least for the best of my abilities / tools available, I would block those users to get torrent pieces from me.

    You don't really mention the torrent client, but many of them support block lists for this sort of purpose. For example, Deluge, which I would highly recommend:

    Plugins/Blocklist – Deluge

    It's up to you get a list of IPs. Perhaps there is an ipfilter.dat already out there, who knows. I tend to not really use torrents.

  • Disabling gdb

    I suspect the problem is probably more on the end of creating the coredump. What I would try is (and don't know if this would work):

    rm -fr /storage/.cache/cores

    ln -s /dev/null /storage/.cache/cores


    If you want to influence the path variable, you can probably do that with /storage/.config/kodi.conf environment file and see if it has any effect. You just create that file, reboot, and before systemd runs the kodi.sh script it will load in that environment file.