Posts by chewitt

Having started on the path of "bad storage" I'not sure it's a correct diagnosis. LE packages the userspace side of the OS into a single squashfs file (SYSTEM) which is decompressed into a virtual (read-only) filesystem in memory. This means that to successfully decompress the SYSTEM file we have to read all the data for SYSTEM from boot media. If there are bad blocks the decompression of SYSTEM and boot fails; LE is not the same as a conventional distro where a bad block impacts only the specific file(s) written on the bad block.

NB: As we decompress SYSTEM into RAM on systems with >=1GB RAM, you can get similar effects to bad boot media with bad RAM.

It's not clear what kind of hardware you're using, but I would deliberately unplug the SSD and boot from an LE image on SD/USB media to rule out RAM or boot media issues. Also, boot logs (dmesg) would be informative.

I'd guess the boot media (SD card?) has bad sectors and that file can no longer be read, which breaks Kodi. Or the filesystem got messed up, but that will normally be fixed automagically on boot, so an underlying storage issue is far more likely. SD/USB media doesn't last forever and even HDD/SSD die eventually. My $0.02 is to backup essential data while you still can.

Create /storage/.config/firmware/brcm and put the firmware files from the DietPi image in the folder and reboot; they will be overlaid onto the /usr/lib/firmware/brcm location and used instead of the embedded files. If that fixes things, great. If not, I would try repeating things with an LE11 nightly image which has newer kernel and drivers (Linux 6.0) to see if that changes anything.

Kodi supports upgrades but not downgrades. If you are very familiar with key files/folders and where things are, and there are still older DB files around it's not hard to move add-ons out of the way (the thing that causes most issues) .. but it's not guaranteed. If you're not so familiar with things you're generally better off doing a backup, clean install, then selective restore of essential things from the backup.

You may want to experiment with the RPi removed from the case. We see lots of random weird bug reprots from Argon One users caused by bad connectors and such. And yes it might have worked fine in the past, but.. that's not always a relevant observation.

laurent734 LE probably needs to use ConnMan with the built-in DNS proxy to avoid DNS leaks at source; but we deliberately don't use the DNS proxy because it means Kodi GUI (correctly) shows 127.0.0.1 as the system DNS server and then we drown in annoyiing user support posts that point fingers at "networking is broken, it shows 127.0.0.1 not my real DNS server" posts from users. The workaround is to force traffic using iptables (read a few posts above).

Quote from b1k3rdude

So one question that came out of this, what version of linux is LE actually based on..?

LE is based on the priciples from https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ which means it's effectively hand-built and not derived from any other Linux distro.

OpenELEC Testbuilds for RaspberryPi Part 3 (Kodi 14.0)

OpenELEC Testbuilds for RaspberryPi Part 3 (Kodi 14.0)

Posts are from 2014 so no idea if it still works

Start by sharing a full debug log and not the micro-snippet that you think is useful .. we want to see more.

Milhouse builds used to have an animated boot splash, although I think those stopped before we switched to the upstream DRM based video pipeline so whatever method was used might not be supported now. I checked and he appears to have deleted (or made private) all his old LE repos so I can't easily point you to the method used though, but there was one (helpful, I know).

I'll summarise:

You aren't using our normal (supported) boot mechanism

You want to add kernel modules we have avoided adding to the distro for years

You are the first person to ever mention ventoy in this forum (that I recall)

You opened a non-bug ticket in a bug tracker

The last point means the ticket will be auto-closed when I get back to my normal laptop (unless someone else beats me to it). The rest just means it would be super low priority to add support.

You are welcome (and encouraged) to self-build your own LE images with the extra modules that you need.

5GHz is capable of being faster than 2.4GHz but requires a better signal to sustain the same data rates (esp. on an RPi which has a relatively rubbish antenna to start with and might have USB3 enabled too) so often you might find a "slower" 2.4GHz connection will achieve better throughput and reliability .. until you add a bunch of other 2.4GHz devices to the network. TL/DR: If you want a reliable connection, run a cable to the RPi, or build a proper WiFi network with multiple base-stations, each with Ethernet backhaul to the main switch/router.

It's possible to fiddle with cache settings in Kodi, but while these can smooth minor peaks/toughs in bandwidth, they will never solve a lack of bandwidth or instability in the connection; which sounds more like the root cause.

The errors in the screenshot are all about device-mapper drivers being missing. I've zero knowledge of ventoy or how it tries to boot things but perhaps something changed on their side. The errors about missing files will be correct because we don't have support for DM baked into our Linux kernels. Support will be present in most conventional distros, but it's nothing new for LE (and OE before) .. we've never had support.

4K requires hardware decoding which isn’t going to work on an N2 due to current issues with the upstream decoding drivers. You’ll need to use CE on the Amlogic vendor/legacy kernel. I can’t say whether that’s laggy or not as I don’t use or track CE (and not that I find RPi4 slow either).

It runs K20b1 and widevine will work the same on C2 as an RPi or any other LE device. No harm in writing a spare SD card to experiment.

Matched DTB for "s4_ap201_4g"

I was expecting S905W2 to be similar to S905X2 (G12A) but actually this is an S4 device so there is no usable support in the upstream kernel at this time. Some patches have started to dribble in but LE will not be supporting them anytime soon. I believe CE have been working on S4 with their vendor-kernel based fork - best to look there.