Posts by chewitt

Nobody is testing anything in advance of it being published, but there is generally an attempt to test the changes before they are merged and then automatically built/published - the build/publish process is completedly automated.

Hello Heiner,

There is negligible mainline kernel support for S905X4 hardware at the current time. Amlogic started to upstream the basics but the quality of initial code submissions is poor and developers are slow to grasp the etiquette standards needed so progress is slow. Bring-up is still at the power-domains and pinctrl stages (some UART driver changes were recently posted too, which might help your cause) but there's some way to go before upstream kernels have a usable level of support. We also have to hope the upstreaming effort continues.

Khadas has VIM4 sources here https://github.com/khadas/u-boot/tree/khadas-vim4-r which might help with understanding the changes in the boot process on your board. I didn't spend long poking around, but I can see a lot more use of signed blobs and such. I'm also told OPTEE is now used for firmware loading (Amlogic ships and requires BL32) so there is clear intent to lock things down, and most of the Amlogic driver sources that I can see are subject to an Amlogic license (not a GPL license) requiring permission to disribute the code in source or binary format. That would be a challenge for a distro like LE. In fact, the more I read and poke around into what's needed for S4/SC2/T7 hardware support, the more I think Kodi support will be limited to Android or a few Linux using OEM manufacturers. It looks like Linux support will need NDAs which LE could never sign (as no legal entity) and would never sign (on principle).

Sorry.. not much help

HiassofT are RPi2/3 are still using patchram to load BT firmware? .. these days everything else (AWL/AML/RK) is driven from device-tree. If RPi did the same we wouldn't see that error, no?

You should be able to access LE settings under the "Add-ons" menu. Not all skins have the shortcut in the Kodi settings menu.

Nothing changed since my previous post.

LE does not support any form of wifi pre-configuration and LE10.x/LE11.x no longer formally support for RPi0 (or other 512MB devies) which is the only device where this Q comes up occasionally. As already suggested, use CEC to set things up; or borrow a USB keyboard from someone.

Add "ssh" to kernel boot params in extlinux.conf and the daemon is forced to start on boot. You probably need to also add something like this to force selection of HDMI instead an LVDS source (which is probably seen as active): video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

cubalibre looks like some kind of DRM problem; the board doesn't see any valid modes on the HDMI connection - none are listed in modetest and the kodi.log shows DRM errors. See if adding "video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60" to params in cmdline.txt works?

Stop Kodi, delete the corrupted DB file, and reboot. On restart Kodi should attempt to migrate the data again.

Quote from debarr

I am asking on the off chance, is there a way to install that dependancy without rolling back to an older version or breaking things horribly?

No chance. However all VPN add-ons are just some form of wrapper around the openvpn binary so you can always create a start/stop script and systemd .service file to start/stop the service.

There is some debate in the team on whether to spin an LE 10.2 release with Kodi 19 and bumped kernels; as as stop-gap until Kodi 20 moves closer towards release. On one hand there's no dispute something with newer kernels is needed. On the other it's a lot of work, and getting people to focus away from the LE 11 codebase won't get a full audience which always raises quality concerns. Kodi DevCon will be in ~3 weeks time so assuming Kodi 20 schedule gets discussed then (it's on the agenda) we'll make a decision after.

That thread reads pretty much as expected. There's a world of difference between "it compiled" and "it works reliably" and drivers for these random no-name chips are normally garbage.

The LE 9.2.8 img will not boot on the newest revisions of RPi4 boards as the boot firmware in the image is too old. We have no plans to release any updated LE 9.2 versions so the best thing to do is use LE 10.0.2 which should boot fine on all RPi4 hardware.

2GB is the minimum for normal LE use. The 4GB or 8GB boards are only really needed if you want to start fiddling with docker containers and other things that consume RAM in the background. You shouldn't need to fiddle with GPU memory defaults; they are set correctly by default.

Please run the test again using a current RPi4 nightly image. Also provide dmesg/journal logs so we can see what hardware it is (and which driver) and any system messages. Pastebin the log with "dmesg | paste" and share the URL.

I haven't pushed any changes that would/should improve or regress anything for Amlogic devices for a couple of weeks, so current nightly testing probably has more placebo than technical effect

As long as you backup the eMMC using "dd" first it shouldn't be too hard to restore it again if things go wrong. GXL devices boot the same from eMMC and SD card so once you've erased eMMC it's simple to test u-boot(s) from SD and when you've proven it works, you can write the boot stuff to eMMC. In the event you do screw up and need to erase eMMC the worst-case scenario is shorting pins on the eMMC chip to stop it being checked during boot, and then the SOC finds u-boot on SD or USB again.

IIRC there are some capabilities that OSMC runs from the secure world (BL32) to prevent them being copied (Dolby Vision?) so any mainline u-boot will lose those (not that upstream supports DV anyway). I can ask Sam for the boot FIPs (minus the BL32 bits I'd expect) and then it's a straightforward process to create a complete image. It's not something I'd have interest in adding to LE as the "box" approach with vendor u-boot works fine, but the ability to TFTP boot can be useful for testing.

RPi4 has no real to-do items remaining unless you care about 3D support - it's my daily driver and very reliable. The only negative might be the lack of native VP9 support for 4K YouTube .. but 1080p streams run fine for me with software decode so it's not an issue for me. N2+ is less supported by LE images at the current time; Amlogic upstream code is a bit experimental in places and 10-bit VP9/HEVC cause issues. CE will be a better choice for an N2 than LE right now.