Posts by Habitual6824

Hey, good to know you're still maintaining this box. I'm on your LE11 build and I think it's the best one yet. I tried out the latest LE12 build and I do notice some issues:

• Wifi still doesn't show any networks to connect to. It's never worked on LE11 either. Mine has the RK3228A + ESP8089.
• My Apple type-c to headphone adapter doesn't show up as an audio device in settings. I did check lsusb and it does show up there so not sure what's up. This also happens in LE11. Currently my workaround is to use a cheap optical/coax to 3.5mm converter, which works with the SPDIF output.
• Framerate on the UI seems pretty low. It was on 720 GUI scaling already but it's unable to hit even 30fps when moving around the menus. In contrast, with LE11, my device occassionally hits 60fps and usually 15 to 20 at worst. This is already with the dtb setup, it was much worse without it as expected. I just use the same one: rk322x-box-mxq4kpro.
  • I do want to note the difference in SD card used. For LE12 i just used an old 16GB Sandisk Ultra w/ nothing but Class 10 certification. On the other hand, LE11 is on a 64GB Sandisk Extreme, notably with C10-V3-U3-A2 certifications. I did use the older card before for LE11 and on the upgrade found that boot and load times to be better but I'm not sure if menu performance should also be influenced by type of sd card.
  • Is emmc install no longer a thing? I have LE10 on my emmc so far but do you think we should just do something like this instead: [HOWTO] Boot from SD card, use internal memory for data - where we move all data to emmc but still need the sd card for boot.

I haven't tried any addons yet. But surprisingly the video playback seems fine? I only tested a couple Hi10p and H265 10bit 1080p videos. Same as LE11, it still struggles with rendering *.ass subtitles w/ complex animations, but maybe that's just how it is since the SoC isn't strong enough.

Again, props for keeping this box alive! For now it's LE11 for me, but I'm curious how far you can push it with this version.

Log file: link 

Hi, sorry for the late feedback. I think performance is decent, but I'd like to try a dtb with clocks that are close to stock (1.2Ghz CPU, 400Mhz GPU). I'm not sure if we're trying to reach fluid 4K H265 playback (not reaching remux bitrates), on the current dtb, but during playback of 4K H265, I almost managed to hit 100C on cpu/gpu temps. Luckily I had a upward firing fan on it, which lowered it to around 80C.

I still also notice some stuttering during 1080p60 H264 playback, which I don't notice as much on the LE9.2 build. Monitoring cpu usage via top, I don't see it going high while playing this file. I also finally got what you meant by performance impact when logging is on, as it's much easier to see it's impact when playing the 60fps file than when playing film.

I can attach a dmesg of both LE 9.2 and your build, maybe there's a difference there. But still thanks for the work so far, this is already far usable than the initial dtbs you had available

Edit: I'm also doing playback tests via SMB, so I'm not ruling out the possibility of bitrate spikes beyond the eth port's speed on 4k stutters. I tried using a UGREEN usb hub + 1Gbe adapter, but it seems USB 3.0 power requirements keep it from turning on, even with the ax88179_178a adapter fix. So I'll update on that too.

Ok having tried these once:
- CPU: crashed after boot, just by navigating the menus

- GPU: Didn't crash, no significant improvement in playback, or menu navigation

- DMC: Didn't crash, I think menus were more fluid somewhat, and playback was significantly better as well. Was also able to try some smaller 4k movies that are small enough for the ethernet to handle, and it seems much better there as well. I still think there's a bit of stutter, but I don't know if that's due to the judder or something. The CPU usage is much lower as well during playback.

I didn't notice any difference with debug logging on/off so I kept it on. Having it off didn't really affect perceived playback for the GPU dtb, and I can see that FPS is higher with DMC on, and lower. Still no SD boot.

Hi, I cleared flash then tried booting on SD but still no luck. I still notice that CPU usage seems higher, around 200-300% when playing either 1080p H264 or H265. It gets particularly high on uncompressed 1080p blurays, and the stuttering is more apparent. Not sure if there's a way I can show dropped frames instead of just cpu usage.

It hasn't crashed yet though, maybe the lower clocks helped, but I'll update on that more.

As for the legacy build I use knaerzche's LE 9.2 legacy release here. Specifically

LibreELEC-RK322x.arm-9.2-devel-20200427213119-b7186bc-rk3228a-mxq4kpro.img.gz version. This boots in SD card just fine. The latest armbian rk322x-box xfce build also boots just fine on SD, but I guess it's too laggy for desktop use.

Hi,

I tested the new dtb on latest build. Still no boot on SD so I had to install via multitool. I then swapped it using your steps, but I also updated the FDT entry on extlinux.conf, that's how it's supposed to be right? Unfortunately it still hangs, result is not much different. I'll attach logs again just in case. If there's no error in logs, does it mean that it crashes before it could log what causes the error?

In a couple of attempts to reboot some sort of kernel errors appear after the boot logo, unfortunately I couldn't get screenshots.

I also want to note that when it hangs, the ssh session also hangs, I'm unable to type anything, and it'll only close once I pull the plug on it.

Thanks for the reply again, no worries about the problems. It's understandable given how many variants these boxes have.

Quote from ilmich

I also ask you to send me the output of this command (from an ssh shell inside the box)

Code

hexdump /sys/devices/platform/11040000.efuse/rockchip-efuse0/nvmem

I've attached the result below. Is it really just that short? This is off of a re-install of latest bulid. Let me know if there's anything else needed.

Thanks for the quick reply, I wanted to try the dtb switch... but now the december build also isn't getting past the boot logo...

I tried dtb once on latest and switched to the mxq pro 4k non-oc, but it got even less stable. Is it possible due to cpu and gpu freq too high? knaerzche mentions in his LE 9.2/9.8 thread that 3228A runs at 1.2Ghz cpu and 400 Mhz gpu, so I assumed the mxq pro 4k dtb made it less stable.

Which brings me to the next thought, maybe I should try using the rk3228A dtb included in the LE9.2/9.8 builds into your build...

Quote from ilmich

Hi Habitual6824,

try with my January build( archive folder ).

In the eternal search of optimal voltages settings, in my last build I've changed something.

Thanks for the reply, I got to try the January build, it seems just as unstable as the latest.

I then proceeded with the december build and it feels more stable. Crashed once so far but managed to try out a bunch of files before doing so. But this time it seems that hardware decode is not working. I get noticeably worse CPU % usage compared to LE 9.8.

Kodi log here: log, dmesg attached below

Hi, I have an MXQ Pro 4k with RK3228A + ESP8089 and 1GB RAM + 8GB ROM. I'm assuming that this firmware is not fit for my box because I'm unable to boot this from sd card (in contrast to multitool, armbian, and the older LE 9.2 from knaerzche).

However I'm able to flash it to my device's emcp, but even then the experience has not been very pleasant, as the device randomly becomes unresponsive, or doesn't continue past the boot logo. I attached some logs below.

Not sure if you're able to do something about this. The older firmware boots in SD but can't be flashed and bricks the device. It is relatively stable but it lacks some features such as use of the remote.