Posts by chewitt

  • who uses two microSD?

    BerryBoot has a long-running negative reputation with LE project staff because it runs it's own kernel instead of ours, which leads to weird problems. The iissues magically resolve themselves when BB is replaced with NOOBS/PINN which work fine.

  • Official LE11 Test Images for Amlogic (Kodi-20)

    frakkin64 interesting. I've submitted this series https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-…/?series=605072 and in patch 3 one of the maintainers has reminded me that this change deliberately dropped SDIO speed to 50MHz:

    [4/6] arm64: dts: meson: fix mmc v2 chips max frequencies - Patchwork

    After that change (some time after) these changes were upstreamed by Khadas:

    [1/2] arm64: dts: meson: improve gxl-s905x-khadas-vim wifi - Patchwork

    [2/2] arm64: dts: meson: improve gxm-khadas-vim2 wifi - Patchwork

    And I also note that all the p212 and p231 dts files in the 4.9 vendor kernels set 100MHz (3.14 sets 200MHz) so I reckon the GXL/GXM datasheets could be wrong (have checked and it does state 50MHz).

    Can I ask you to run some proper before/after iperf tests with the 50MHz > 100MHz change (only), then a test with any other changes (and share the dts diff) and then start a new thread with the results in a post that I can link to. I'll run some smoke tests here too, and if all good I will include a bump to 100MHz (at least) and refer to the post when I resend the current p212 cleanup series.

  • Official LE11 Test Images for Amlogic (Kodi-20)

    frakkin64 Amlogic's codebase of forward-ported stuff started to mingle with the upstream codebase in their latest BSP release based on Linux 5.4, but for now they only adopted some things like crypto acceleration drivers which are quite simple. Otherwise it's simple, their kernel defconfg compiles their drivers, not the upstream ones, and everything remains separate. Over time I'd expect to see them align on core board support (which their developers are upstreaming) but they will keep all the media bits separate.

    The clm blobs allow a board manufactuer to tune the wireless card for their specific implementation so they are board (not card) specific and thus not appropriate to use generically in "distro supports many boards" scenarios. It's a little different with e.g. RPi4 where we pull the firmware blobs from a repo dedicated to RPi firmware and we know they are only used with the correct board hardware. Lack of clm blobs is not the issue and the 'error' is harmless.

    See https://github.com/torvalds/linux…a3c0cb287f6e223 for some history on the alignment message. I think it needs to be solved in brcmfmac? - I'll ask maintainers again. The p231 dts inherits 50MHz from https://github.com/torvalds/linux…-q20x.dtsi#L262 as most of the reference boards have slow speeds set. The solution for that might be to create an upstream board dts for Vero4+ that sets higher SDIO clock. Can you share "dmesg | paste" please.

    MPEG2 should be supported (the codec is upstream) but no idea what state it's in - I'll have to go create media to test it.

    tomaszc Collabora work on open-source Mali GPU support and also media codecs in Rockchip hardware which are derived from the same Hantro G1/G2 IP blocks that are also used in Allwinner SoC devices (so the upstream code overlaps and supports both vendors). They are not working on anything for Amlogic that I'm aware of, but we collaborate with them on other hardware.

  • wpa_supplicant configuration on LE10

    LE uses ConnMan to manage wireless connections. ConnMan uses wpa_supplicant as a library (for now, until we switch to iwd) but you cannot configure connections that way. ConnMan supports connection to EAP networks, but our GUI is aimed firmly at dommestic users and does not implement support for configuration. However you can still create an appropriate *.config file under /storage/.cache/connman with required details and it will work (over the years there are a small number of reports of people doing it).

    See https://manpages.debian.org/testing/connma…onfig.5.en.html for the large array of possible options and some examples.

  • Missing resolvconf in libreelec 10

    That's something different .. /etc/resolv.conf is not the same as "update-resolv-conf" which looks to be a script used when connections are brough up/down. You can install the script somewhere on /storage and change the openvpn config to call the scrtip from that location instead of /etc/openvpn which is not writeable.

  • A95X F3 Amlogic S905W2

    I'm not sure anyone has tested with an S905W2 chip so you'll have to go first and let us know. I would start with "meson-sm1-a95xf3-air.dtb" in uEnv.ini as that's quite simple hardware and probably a close match. I've no idea what WiFi module is in the box so it will be Ethernet only until someone shares some close-up photo's of the board inside. The Android boot log would also be useful.

  • Official LE11 Test Images for Amlogic (Kodi-20)

    Quote from frakkin64

    Is Amlogic actually upstreaming any of their newer devices? Or are they going the Realtek route?

    Amlogic recently started upstreaming support for S805X2 which is one of their latest budget chips, but it's a cut-down version of S905X4 so in theory that should be useful - they are still making the decision about whether to upstream S905X4 too, but the differences shouldn't be too significant so I hope they do. Regarless, it will be a slow process as their downstream code style is often old/outdated and overal quality is low so it takes many iterations of patches to raise standards to the point where the kernel maintainers will accept things. I'm also expecting them to focus on support for the core board systems only and make no attempt to upstream the media parts. That's a good/bad thing; it's it's the thing we need most, but their downstream drivers are extremely complicated with lots of features and the lack of anything upstream creates the opportunity to apply the "less is more" principle and implement only the capbilities we actually need. Anyway, it's early days and I don't expect to boot LE images on latest generation hardware anytime soon.

  • Official LE11 Test Images for Amlogic (Kodi-20)

    Quote from tomaszc

    Some time ago, there was a post on LibreElec and Collabora Twitter about work on a driver for Mali T760 and newer. If the driver is created and working, will it be possible to hardware decode without HEVC, just using this driver ( something like hwdec=auto in mpv) and solve the video rewind issues? - I don't quite understand how currently HEVC uses GPU hardware decoding if we don't have drivers.

    No. In the x86 world the "Graphics Card" sort of combines everything into one device. In the ARM world GPU and VDEC are totally separate things. In an Amlogic box the Mali GPU (Panfrost or Lima drivers which are upstream and work great) accelerates rendering of the Kodi GUI via OpenGLES (squares and triangles are being drawn on the screen via maths) and an IP block on the core SoC (S905 etc.) decodes video frames for rasterising to a DRM (digital rendering manager) device like an HDMI tranceiver.

    Fixing HEVC is going to be a lot of work as the older and newer hardware generations are quite different. I'm not going to go into too many details just yet, but there is a plan of sorts forming on how to get some of the outstandinig issues resolved (and who will do the work). It's unlikely to be quick though, so we have to be a little patient.

  • MeCool M8S Pro W

    The specs I found online suggest it has the SSV6051P WiFi chip. If true it is not supported and won't ever be - we have sources for the driver but they are ugly code (easily the worst legacy driver code we've seen) and will not compile on any kernel newer than Linux 4.11 without a major rewrite that nobody sane is going to volunteer for. Plan B is to use a USB WiFi stick (avoid Realtek ones). Plan C is a WiFi bridge that presents Ethernet to the box via a short cable. I use an old Apple Aïrport express like this during board/box testing as (even with boxes that have supported WiFi chips) it eliminates the need to configure WiFi to get online.

    I've no idea where the reset button is, but the normal locations we see with cheap TV boxes are either between the air-holes/grille on the underside of the box, or down the bottom of the 3.5mm AV jack.

    One of the USB ports is probably an OTG port that can be connected to a PC to flash the eMMC with an Android image via Amlogic burning tool .. but I have no advice on what image to use.