Posts by chewitt

In post #1 you state "Booted into Libreelec 11.0.3 from the card."

In reality the box booted vendor u-boot from eMMC (as S905 silicon is hard-coded to look for boot firmware on eMMC first and it existed via the factory image, so it did boot it) but then LE11 was found and loaded from the SD card, thus proving that the SD card slot works, and much like the Hub .. you just need to feed it the right software.

If you have written the LE11 board image to eMMC it will now be booting upstream u-boot (not vendor) which uses different boot files/config but the boot flow remains the same; silicon checks eMMC first and if it finds boot firmware it runs it regardless of what's on the SD card. If you want to force the box to boot from SD card the only way is either a) erasing eMMC (or the first few MB) so that u-boot is not discoverable on eMMC, or b) using a special HDMI dongle (as mentioned in the other thread). Assuming A which is easier: If silicon (BL1 in the boot chain) cannot find boot firmware (BL2) on eMMC *then* it will check for a correctly structured SD card for boot firmware. Correctly structured means magic headers at specific disk sectors, the BL1 bootrom has no ability to look for files in partitions/filesystems.

At this stage if you put the "board" image on an SD card, the box will boot u-boot from eMMC, which will then find the LE boot files on SD and boot them (upstream u-boot has logic to check SD and USB for boot files first). If you put the "box" image on SD the same might happen too. In either case, eMMC is not "active" after the initial u-boot step and can be safely overwritten from userspace using emmctool and you choice of software: either the "backup-wp2.img.gz" file (to restore the factory image) or perhaps the LE11 image again. It is unusual that the /storage partition resize failed .. but it's not the end of the world. You can fix this at any time by running "touch /storage/.please_resize_me && reboot" .. and on reboot the partition will be erased and recreated using 100% of the remaining space on disk.

NB: Upstream u-boot doesn't map the power button or reset button to have any boot-level functions, but that's not particularly important if you understand the (different from vendor u-boot) boot flow.

Right, so nothing is bricked, it's just missing software. I have an idea, but you'll need to be a little patient.

You can prove the device boots (and is not bricked) from SD card by writing https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…etek-hub.img.gz to a spare card. It will likely get stuck at the same point during u-boot, but you will see the initial boot stage spew text on the UART console.

Confirm it does? .. and I have an idea.

Can you try a current LE12 nightly? .. I didn't test with LE11 but with my own LE12 image it definitely has issues but didn't crash.

I haven't tested with a C2 board for a while, but a quick test with a WeTek Play2 (also GXBB, identical in software) and HDMI pass-through seems to work fine here (AVR shows DTS correctly). NB: If you want multi-channel PCM output (PT disabled) you'll need to set the speaker layout in Kodi to 5.1 or 7.1 etc. else it will be 2.0 (default).

You cannot change the size of the current icons. You can use a different set of "picon" images which are a different/better resolution.

See https://marhycz.github.io/picons/ for some examples. There are lots of different TVHeadend picon sources if you Google for them.

if dbus_dep.found() and fftw_dep.found()                                                  
  all_modules += [                                                                        
    [ 'module-equalizer-sink', 'module-equalizer-sink.c', [], [], [dbus_dep, fftw_dep, libm_dep] ],
  ]                                                                                       
endif

^ from PulseAudio meson.build file. The equalizer sink is only built when FFTW is present: https://www.fftw.org/download.html

I wouldn't attempt to do this as a separate plugin.. You'd just custom built and image with FFTW added and then Pulse should find it and build itself with the equaliser module included, and then the Kodi GUI add-on has something to configure. Sounds simple enough but there's likely a little more to the actual 'doing' of it

Quote

"so you MUST invoke recovery mode boot"

It was clear to me ..

Yes

RPi4:~ # date
Tue Aug 15 11:17:41 +04 2023
RPi4:~ # connmanctl clock
  Time = 1692083766
  TimeUpdates = auto
  Timezone = Asia/Dubai
  TimezoneUpdates = auto
  Timeservers = [  ]
  TimeserverSynced = True

Have you forced/set the list of NTP servers? .. we use pool.ntp.org by default ^ so there should be no need to set anything.

He hangs out in the #linux-amlogic IRC channel on Libera.Chat, or on the linux-amlogic kernel mailing list, and issues can be submitted on his GitHub account: https://github.com/xdarklight/linux .. all I'm really doing is packaging his latest kernel into an LE image.

I'd guess there is an issue with the kernel DRM driver or perhaps the device-tree needs adjusting to reflect changes in the driver. I built the 10.88.0 image to keep the codebase sort-of updated but I never booted it on anything so there are probably bugs. It really needs someone with a bigger interest in Meson8 hardware (and who has some boxes) to report issues to Martin Blumenstingl and work through the testing with him. Martin is super helpful but in the absence of regular user feedback he tends to focus on other projects.

Legacy images use different boot-scripts and boot files to the AMLGX image so you MUST invoke recovery mode boot so the vendor u-boot searches for aand finds/loads/stores updated boot-scripts that tell it what files to use. If this is not done u-boot is looking for boot files that don't exist and .. it isn't going to boot. Similarly if you have been running AMLGX and want to revert to the legacy image you need to do the same else u-boot is looking for the AMLGX boot files and won't find/use the legacy ones.

I'm not completely against having an Argon add-on in our repo, but IMHO the better approach would be for Argon to host their own repo so they can maintain the add-on and push updates to their users from a central location.

Since LE11 we use the exFAT drivers in the kernel (no more need for FUSE) but you'll need to share the URL from "dmesg | paste" with the drive connected for anyone to comment.

LibreComputer are funding someone to work on the HEVC driver (which does HEVC, VP9 and H264 on newer hardware) but we have recently learned that developer's approach/effort for the last three months has ended in a dead-end; which is both annoying and rather predictable since they didn't share their WIP code with people who'd have pointed out the wrong move earlier. Hopefully in the mid-term future there is something to share as the rest of the codebase is quite usable.

RPi4 isn't the higest-spec board, but everything on it works and the ongoing software support we receive from Raspberry Pi is the gold-standard that all other SoC vendors fail to achieve. Now that supplies seem to be resolved, it's worth considering. Or you can stick with the CE image; it might be cluttered and over-tweaked in places, but if it works..

You probably need to share a Kodi debug log for anyone to comment on what might be happening. As someone using an RPi4 for the family daily driver and with all media stored on a Synology NAS accessed over SMB .. I can state that don't see large delays in playback start (it's near instant) so it's something odd and specific to your environment.