Posts by chewitt

  • Is there an active Pi4 'testing' build? (Sorry, I had a peek, can't see one?)

    LE 9.2.4 will be the next release. I have no expectations of improvements to anything in the GUI because aside from minor firmware corrections there are no real-world changes to the current (legacy) drivers. The primary focus of development remains on shifting the platform to GBM/V4L2 and the new driver architecture for LE10. I do not initially expect the LE10 codebase to improve upon LE9.2 either, in fact it may be worse in some areas at first and it will take time to mature.

  • Password reset/recovery?

    Code
    RPi4:~ # ls -l /storage/.cache/shadow 
----------    1 root     root           231 Apr 11  2019 /storage/.cache/shadow

    ^ nothing changed since we implemented the feature so the same procedure will still work. Note that you cannot do this from Windows as the storage partition is EXT4 and Windows cannot read EXT4 partitions; you'll only see the VFAT boot parition which does not contain the files. You can also set a new password from the LE settings add-on in the GUI so there's no real-world need to do this.

  • Running Standard RasbianOS on Slice CM1

    CM3 is a great (and the only) upgrade for a Slice CM1 box but IMHO these days the $$ would be bettter invested in a 2GB RPi4. Compiling needs RAM and CM1 is 1GB (4GB is emmc) so I wouldn't attempt building kernels on the device unless I had no alternative option; cross-compiling on a laptop/desktop machine with 8GB (typically) will be massively faster.

  • Odroid H2+, Realtek RTL8125B drivers

    ^ looks enabled (almost) everywhere in Linux 5.7 configs.

  • LibreElec and NVidia / AMD GPU's, current status

    Hmm, the VDPAU announcement of 10/12-bit support is interesting. If it works on a broad range of cards it might result in a stay of execution. If it only works on the latest cards it might not be so appealing (our stats show nvidia is mostly legacy users). It might also require someone to tweak Kodi in some areas; and there's low desire to work on nvidia things among the current core Kodi devs.

  • Is there an active Pi4 'testing' build? (Sorry, I had a peek, can't see one?)

    RPi4: switch to KMS driver and enable v4l2 HEVC decoding by HiassofT · Pull Request #4288 · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv · GitHub <= LE master branch has been on Linux 5.4 for a while now, but the main GBM/V4L2 changes were merged only yesterday. Right now anyone using an LE10 test image will find a few functional regressions over the LE9.2 codebase, but hey it's still a pre-Alpha state branch so we provide zero promises about that, and there's nothing like a spot of breakage to focus people's attention on fixing the outstanding problem stuff :)

  • LibreElec and NVidia / AMD GPU's, current status

    Kodi has not dropped VDPAU support for v19 and LE10 will still support nVidia chips. Our Stats show a continued decline in nVidia users and there are still more installs with older cards (legacy driver) than new ones. Although VDPAU is not technically "dead" there is no progress on 10-bit support so at some point (maybe Kodi v20) the axe will fall.

  • @balbes150 LE images with Kodi-19 for S9xxx

    The boot arrangements for legacy and mainline kernels are completely different so attempting updates is just asking for a pile of support issues, so a forced reinstall is the best option. It's no problem to backup and restore Kodi data between versions as that doesn't change much, although if the backup contains binary add-ons you'll see a list of add-on "fail to start" errors until newer versions are downloaded and updated. That's nothing new though, it's the same as any LE major-version update.

    The main idea we've asked the Availink folks to grasp is; if they develop something that works on the Amlogic 4.9 kernel today they will be screwed in the future when Amlogic bumps to 4.19 (or god forbid, something newer) and they will never get it upstream to the mainline kernel as it won't follow kernel APIs and coding standards. However if they create a driver that runs on the mainline kernel today, they will be free to add whatever hacks are needed to backport it onto Amlogic bsp kernels (as no rules apply there). That's been understood, and we also persuaded them to relicense the driver under GPLv2 instead of something proprietary and restrictive.

    So things are progressing and I'm able to compile the Availink demod (or an earlier version, I didn't rebase on it for a while) but it's still early stage and only one of several components needed for DVB support. Work also needs to be done on the tuner drivers that are used with their demo, which exist in various forms (not all have good prevenance for license and future upstreaming) but these needed to be deconstructed and adapted into independent modular drivers; the Amlogic kernel compiles them into a single monolithic blob, which is meh. Then the major missing piece is a new V4L2 demux; the mainline kernel has a completely different DRM architecture so we cannot repurpose code from the Amlogic kernel. And finally if we get that done, it should all be describable from device tree so that different tuner/demod combos work without special compiling. The availink folks are not completely sold on the whole story yet, but if we can at least get their demod and tuners to build alongside a new demod, the rest can take time.

  • Restore backup on different architecture

    If I were doing it myself I would unpack the backup tar file on a clean install, stop Kodi, move sources, guisettings, thumbnail chaches and the userdata addon_data folders over, then restart Kodi and simply reinstall all add-ons. It probably takes longer to investigate each add-on and work out whether it's binary or not, than it takes to blindly do all of them. If you're familiar with copy/move Linux commands this is no more than 10 mins effort.

  • @balbes150 LE images with Kodi-19 for S9xxx

    If you boot any of the mainline kernel "box" images, the contents of emmc can be backed up with 'dd' but this is slow and requires an SD card (or USB) larger than the emmc size to store the image. At least with S905 devices the emmc sizes are typically 8-16GB only so that's not such a big deal.

    NB: LE does not support update of legacy OS installs to the LE10 codebase, a clean install is required. If the Amlogic 3.14 kernel is detected during update we abort, and if you manually override the compat check the box will (guaranteed 100%) end up in a broken boot state.

  • Restore backup on different architecture

    There are some audio/video config items in Kodi settings (guisettings.xml) that will be different due to hardware differences, but as you discovered the main problem will be binary add-ons, which must be removed before taking the backup that you want to migrate to the new device. Once you've restored you can reinstall them. When removing an add-on you can choose to completely remove or leave data behind. In theory if you leave behind your config(s) will be resumed on reinstall.