Posts by chewitt

Owner and permissions are never an issue as 'the' user in the OS is root and we deliberately execute bash and call the script to avoid the need for users include a shebang or make the script executable. And.. the problem was already resolved.

Install the "Turn Off" screensaver from the Kodi repo. It turns the screen off instead of just showing a full-screen black image.

------------ /sys/devices/virtual/amhdmitx/amhdmitx0/rawedid ------------
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

^ That from the CE dump confirms that there is bad (zero) EDID data on the HDMI connection. The difference between the vendor kernel and mainline is that the vendor kernel includes a bunch of forced defaults which allow things to work. The upstream kernel doesn't, so there is no active video or audio connection. If you've tried other cables and TVs then I'd guess something got damaged in the HDMI socket.

The one thing you can try is configuring the box to use an edid.bin file, and substitute the edid.bin captured from another device.

edid-decode /sys/devices/platform/soc/d0100000.vpu/drm/card0/card0-HDMI-A-1/edid | paste

Remove the override from uEnv.ini and reboot, then run ^ that and share the URL please. If the output from the main command is null, you need to check the HDMI cables and connection (unplug and change cable, use a different port on the TV etc.) .. as that's the single most likely cause of not seeing EDID data.

#!/bin/bash
(
sleep 10
echo "17" > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo "out" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction
echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
)&

^ see if that works then? .. if it does there's a timing issue and you should switch to a system.d service and schedule the events properly in the userspace boot sequence (autostart.sh is a rather blunt tool).

SSD drives fail differently to mechanical HDD drives. The management firmware can persistently mark memory areas; so in the current boot cells can go bad causing a cascade of problems, but on reboot those gone-bad areas are marked bad so capacity reduced but problems are avoided .. until more cells go bad. In my experience once cells start failing reliability only heads in a downwards direction.

LE automatically fsck's any filesystems marked dirty on boot, so if a drive (and thus partitions and filesystems had issues) we attempt cleanup and this might keep things working. In this respect our distro packaging into two files (KERNEL and SYSTEM) means as long as those files are intact a reboot often does a "clean" start; but equally if those files are damaged you have a total boot failure.

Kingspec are a budget SSD manufacturer so I would have lower expectations on drive lifespan compared to e.g. Samsung EVO 'pro' drives, and I would expect less-developed firmware which increases the probability of low-level issues where the entire drive behaves bad or has problem interactions with BIOS etc.

To me, the log looks like a dying drive. Make sure you have a backup of any important config.

If you want to share logs use the built-in "paste" function AND share a complete debug log not just the snippet of non-debug log that you think is important.

Status Update: Drinking morning coffee and trying to work up some enthusiasm for Intel CPU hardware. I'm struggling..

I'd start with repeating the setup on a clean SD card and the current LE12 nightly .. it will have updated kernel + ffmpeg + kodi and is what devs are working on (LE11 is not under active development now). Also, when you say "crashes out" does HTPC lock up (hard crash) or simply video stops and it drops back to the home screen (soft crash)?

Make sure the Wireless Regulatory Domain matches your country (or what the router is configured as). No idea why BT is not probing... but then I have low/no real knowledge of Allwinner hardware.

Perhaps background the content in the script and insert a sleep period to see if it's timing related and a delay will fix?

Quote from sedlin

Still there is another issue - no audio at all. Is there similar kernel boot parameter for audio?

Nope. Audio depends on the EDID data from the HDMI connection which is clearly missing. Please run "pastekodi" over SSH and share the URL so we can see if there are errors in the boot log.

video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

You can try adding that ^ to kernel boot params in uEnv.ini to force output to 1080@60 .. but if the resolution is not auto-detected the normal reason is bad/broken EDID data from the TV/Monitor on the HDMI connection or a bad HDMI cable, or (rarely, but possible) broken pins in the HDMI connector.

mkdir -p /storage/.config/firmware/brcm
wget http://ix.io/4tpc -O /storage/.config/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4330-sdio.oranth,tanix-tx6.txt
reboot

^ see if that nvram config works better. Run "pastekodi" and "ifconfig | paste" after boot and share the URLs. Also ensure the correct wireless regulatory domain has been configured in LE settings.

Kodi hasn't been niche for 20 years and while LE is smaller, we've always sought to keep the distro simple and one of the ways that's done it avoiding niche things that few people use. To quote Spock .. "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

I wouldn't guarantee that the subreddit has official team members moderating it. Kodi forums are the correct place to make and discuss feature requests but you'll need to find someone who cares to code the feature.

Check/set the Wireless Regulatory Domain setting in LE network settings for your country. Perhaps the router is advertising on frequencies that are not visible under the default config. Then clean boot and run "journalctl | paste" and share the URL.

The "error" messages related to brcmfmac are harmless since the driver falls back to the generic filenames automatically and no device has the clm_blob file available (and it's not essential. All looks good to me; so there should be a wlan0 device in the OS and you should be able to configure a WiFi connection. If not, share "journalctl | paste" after attempting to configure a connection.

Quote from charles_carmichael

Seeing as both the projects mentioned above do have the source code available as open source, would it be possible to include a feature built-in to Kodi for this?

Kodi is open-source to technically everything is always possible, but since most projectors have in-built keystone correction capabilities adding a software correction feature is a niche use-case; and the perpetual challenge with niche use-cases and open-source is finding that one other person with the coding skills and motivation to implement and then maintain support for the feature.

It's not something LE would do .. in part because it would need to be done in Kodi; we only package Kodi into a convenient distro image.