I would try that, but I lack the knowledge and most importantly the hardware.
I tried something similar 5+ years ago, to recreate a setup similar to libreelec's with alpine. All went fine, except that I could not configure the network from within kodi, which is important when kodi IS the desktop enviroment. All "network configuration" related addons were either abandoned or with very limited functionality.
Replying as a user who was on nvidia 340 until 2 years ago that I was forced to change my gpu because it got damaged.
That driver went eol in late 2019 or early 2020 (not that nvidia was actively supporting it until then), but the linux community still supports it with patches up to this day. As for nouveau, I think you already know it is not a viable alternative yet, so the communitys' help on that is invaluable.
Likewise, the community still finds ways to make wl (= an equally old driver) work with current (and future) kernels. They share patches, they adapt them for their distros and so on. Why can't le do the same and use them too? Is that "jeos" nature of le that is limits it?
Because this 1 month that I have the issue, besides my main distro, I have tested if wl can be built on arch, alpine and ubuntu 25.10, all with 6.16 (ubuntu now on 6.17rc) and it built on every one of them. I know it is not a huge sample, but I try my best to use mainstream distros and not derivatives. I would also test fedora and opensuse (rawhide and tumbleweed respectively) but they did not do me the favor of an easy installation of headers and the like.
Last but not least, if patching is a big issue, I would rather use an lts kernel and have everything working fine for a year than hunt for patches every 4 months that there is a new kernel release. And I am saying that as a user of a rolling release distro.
After all, the one who will pick the generic-legacy image over the generic one, probably does not care for the latest and greatest.
I'm genuinely surprised that it hasn't been dropped from the kernel in a dead-code cleanup.
Maybe they are waiting for bcma to better support cards like mine 
Btw, i found this bit about bcma on kernel's documentation and I have no idea what all that means.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/readme/drivers-bcma-README
In other news, debian finally fixed wl to build with 6.16, with these 2 patches. Can't you add the same in le?
Package: broadcom-sta
| Debian Sources
Package: broadcom-sta
| Debian Sources
As it seems, the issue was known in launchpad and a patch was available... a month ago.
Although the patch has not been part of the package yet, I patched it manually and I can verify it works.
To change subject, is there a chance to add b43? It may work better than debian's b43. Of course it will need firmware files, but they have not changed at all over the years, they be acquired by the b43-cutter script, if providing them with the installation is not possible.
A glimpse to the future. Ubuntu 25.10 got 6.17(-rc3) today and wl fails to build again.
In other news, ubuntu patched wl months ago and it does build with 6.16. Oddly, the only change in that patch is the function.
I installed ubuntu (server) 25.10 from its daily iso and the module built with no issues at all. Log
As I mentioned in the relevant bug report for debian, and with the help of someone who knows a lot more than me, the issue is (probably) the "from_timer" function which first appeared on the 4.15 patch and was probably deprecated on 6.15 or later.
The le patch looks very similar to the debian one here and it also includes the "from_timer" function,
Package: broadcom-sta
| Debian Sources
However, the driver compiles with no issues on alpine and arch, which are both on 6.16 today. Why? Because they do not use the "from_timer" function in their (identical) patch for 4.15.
Is the buld error related to objtool, like here?
#1107953 - linux: objtool fails after reporting a warning - Debian Bug report logs
I know that nvidia 340 did not make it to 12.2 too.
The day has come! 6.16 just reached debian unstable and wl can not be built for this reason.
Debian Pastezone
Is it the same for le too? I am now checking how other distros deal with it.
I do not really want to quit le about that, so I thought of changing the wifi card. But it is hard to find something that matches the port on the laptop and the available height for it.
p.s. Thanks for adding "x86-64" to the title, but the "missing the wifi driver completely" is wrong. Other wifi drivers are there, only wl is missing.
If a better patch becomes available, will it be readded? There is no b43 btw, neither in 12.0.2 nor in 12.2.0.
# modinfo b43
modinfo: ERROR: Module b43 not found.I wanted to see if anything has changed in 12.2 on the "bad" cooperation between connman and iwd.
I am one of the "lucky few" who have a broadcom wifi card that works better (if not only) with wl. This is the card in question
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]Up until 11, wl was correctly auto selected and the card was working with no extra work
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Kernel driver in use: wl
Kernel modules: wl, bcmaOn 12.0, NONE of the two was auto selected, so I got no network interface at all
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: bcma, wl
# connmanctl technologies
/net/connman/technology/ethernet
Name = Wired
Type = ethernet
Powered = True
Connected = True
Tethering = False
TetheringFreq = 0
So I blacklisted bcma, like so
echo "blacklist bcma" >> /storage/.config/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and on next boot, wl made it work
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Kernel driver in use: wl
Kernel modules: bcma, wl
# connmanctl technologies
/net/connman/technology/ethernet
Name = Wired
Type = ethernet
Powered = True
Connected = True
Tethering = False
TetheringFreq = 2412
/net/connman/technology/wifi
Name = WiFi
Type = wifi
Powered = True
Connected = False
Tethering = False
TetheringFreq = 0
On 12.2 though, wl does not even exist as driver or option, so there is no way to make it work
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: bcma
# modprobe wl
modprobe: FATAL: Module wl not found in directory /lib/modules/6.16.0
# connmanctl technologies
/net/connman/technology/ethernet
Name = Wired
Type = ethernet
Powered = True
Connected = True
Tethering = False
TetheringFreq = 0The outputs above are from the generic-legacy images for 12.0.2 and 12.2.0, booted in "run mode". Also note that bcma, supposedly, supports the card
# modinfo bcma | grep 4359
alias: pci:v000014E4d00004359sv*sd*bc*sc*i*p.s. I also use wl on debian unstable x64 that is the regular os on that laptop, but it is on 6.12, so I can not tell if it compiles or not on 6.16. Hopefully, now that the freeze for debian 13 is over, unstable will move to 6.16 soon and I will know. On that system, I had used b43 the first couple of days, but it has a lot of issues, thus the move to wl.
Sorry for the huge delay in answering. Now that both the exams and the heatwaves are over, I have some time to answer.
My main goal is to have a working device with nothing sticking out of it. Ideally, this means reverting it to its original boot loader, which is almost impossible to achieve.
The second option is to have a stable version of le running on it. But the stable version of le does not contain the wireless driver because its wifi chip is... realtek, so I have to resort to powerline if I chose that solution. That is the current status, now that I made it boot from usb.
Third option is to use one of your images, since they do contain the driver. But that means using a dev version of le, and very frequent updates.
If you consider that I want to use it as an iptv device only, I think I have done too much for it but I haven't forgotten anything.
I really hate this tvbox. Before reading further, please note that, unlike the s805 tvboxes that can boot only from sdcard, the s905 ones can boot from usb too, at least in theory.
So I downloaded the amlgx aarch64 image for le 12, extracted it and flashed it to a usb stick with dd, changed the line in uenv.ini to this
dtb_name=/dtb/meson-gxbb-p201.dtb
stuck it in usb1 and crossed my fingers. Nothing happened, not even the amlogic boot logo with the tiger showed up. And the same happened on the other usb ports too. If it plays any role, I noticed that the stick's power led takes a few seconds to light up after the tvbox is started.
Has anything changed since le 11? Because there is no dtb folder in there, just one named amlogic. On the other hand though, the sdcard which does have le 12, also has the same line in uenv.ini and has a dtb folder and it boots just fine. But that is le 11 UPGRADED to le 12.
That led me to change the above line to
dtb_name=/amlogic/meson-gxbb-p201.dtb
and, low and behold, it booted... after like 2-3 minutes of being "stuck" in the le and kodi splash screens! It even popped that systemd error message about ethmactool-config.service.
So what do I do now?
Although I do use wl with debian and 6.12 currently, I know what you mean, I see it on the package's changelog. But that is not my concern here.
I want to know if the tvbox, with the altered boot configuration etc because of le, will boot from a usb stick. Will it?
I am really sorry for bringing this to the surface after ~1 year of inactivity, but I decided to throw in the towel with restoring the original firmware.
After 1 year of countless tries, on different systems, with different versions of amlogic burn tool (even the bash script for linux), different versions of drivers, different cables (even homemade ones) and a few powered usb hubs, I have concluded that this bit the reason of all those failures
[ 26.557209] usb 3-2: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 26.695720] usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1b8e, idProduct=c003, bcdDevice= 0.07
[ 26.695739] usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[ 27.969026] usb 3-2: USB disconnect, device number 2Every single time, the device is disconnected after less than 1 second and nothing can be done afterwards. And this happens ONLY for usb1, as if all the other ports are dead.
So here is the question. I want to remove the sd card completely. If I flash a new img on a usb stick and put it on the tvbox, will it boot without any extra work or not?
I changed the vm's vga to "vmsvga", enabled 3d acceleration and maxed its video memory to 128mb. The best thing it managed to do is to show libreelec's splash screen, followed by 4-5 failed attempts to start xorg and then a reboot.
What is worse, while the vm could not start xorg, it was keeping the mouse captured, so I had no way to close it. I switched to a tty and force-closed it with
vboxmanage controlvm LibreELEC poweroffLe 12 on virtualbox: does not work, many issues, would not recommend, 1 star 
As for the original issue that I opened the thread, it seems to still be present as you can see in the screenshots below.
lspci shows that libreelec/linux recognizes video card as VMWare SVGA II adapter.
The lspci output above says that it is a virtualbox vga. So, if there is no driver for it in the supplied ova file, this means it is incompatible with virtualbox. If this is really the case, I would like it to be mentioned somewhere, like the generic image states "no nvidia support" in parentheses.
As for the hijacking, I opened this thread a year ago and my issue was that le could not run properly on vmware... because it had no free space to do anything and, as the dev said, it was an issue with the ova file. I remembered it when I decided to try le 12 in a vm, but I was hoping it was fixed, because the pull request was indeed merged. I am now downloading gparted to check its size.
Second attempt with libreelec's vm image, on virtualbox this time and for my pleasure. I downloadd the "generic legacy" ova file, I imported it to virtualbox and this happened. Shall I give up already?
