Hey Chewitt, no chance to get my trusty Wetek play1 back on a supported version ?
Nope. It's a struggle to get people to work on mainline Linux support for the latest Amlogic chips, let alone a chip from 2014 that was slow at the time it was released. There is nobody doing any work on mainline Linux Meson 6 support, so this unlikely to change, so LE 9.0 is (and will remain) the last release for 8726MX devices like WP1.
It's not the first time we see "Amlogic" MX boxes sold with Rockchip SoCs inside. The chip rotated 45º confirms it's not an S905 chip, this is only seen with RK and Allwinner chips.
From the LE repo, under Inputstream Add-ons
@chewitt - can you please tell me if the dtb are the same from (LibreELEC-S905.arm-7.0.3.012l.img) where my box it's running perfectly with gxbb_p200_1G_100M_RealtekWiFi.dtb to be put on this release as well? 9.95.2? I think not but worth a try to ask you before. Thanks!
No. LE 7.x-9.x is using Linux 3.14 kernel and LE10 images are using 5.10+ .. everything is different.
LE runs 64-bit kernel and 32-bit userspace (so widevine DRM libs work), so the =arm in the build command is correct, and the aarch64 kernel conf is also correct. The original problem is probably solved by using "boot=LABEL=LIBREELEC disk=LABEL=STORAGE" in extlinux.conf instead of the GUIDs; assuming LIBREELEC/STORAGE are the partition labels.
Someone needs to write a V4L2 demux driver before any work can be done on supporting internal DVB cards (and then there's reworking the demod driver, and the pile of individual tuner drivers). I'm not expecting that work to happen anytime soon.
I've told you where the files are. You have full permission to use some initiative and see what happens.
There’s a reason why we all use VPN’s on Kodi.
^ pirates always (wrongly) assume that everyone else is like them 
FYI. I’m here for support and help out anybody who is having or experiencing this issue.
^ the forum staff are here to support people who aren't pirates.
LE 9.2 reached a point where it worked for the majority of use-cases, and then the focus moved away from legacy MMAL/OMX decoding onto the all-new GBM/V4L2 codebase. The older methods still have rough edges that will never be fixed, so if you have problem media I'd suggest you retest under LE10, because bugs/issues found there are of interest to the developers.
LE 9.2.6 from the downloads page on the website
Will in-place upgrades be allowed on the final release? Understand it's not recommended, but I have a massive DB and would rather not rescan everything again.
No, because add-ons frequently cause problems in any Kodi major version upgrade and the Py2 > Py3 move from K18 > K19 throws up some extra challenges. Nothing impossible for knowledgeable users to figure out, but the other 98% of our userbase will panic and use lots of bad words. We aren't going to stop people from doing it, but the warnings will stay and if people ignore them; users should expect low sympathy when things go wrong.
That said. I would stop Kodi, move /storage/.kodi to /storage/.kodi-old, download the LE10 image file to /storage/.update/ and then reboot. It will upgrade to an empty Kodi install which sidesteps 99% the issues with outdated Py2 add-ons. Then stop Kodi, and move /storage/.kodi-old/userdata to /storage/.kodi/userdata and restart again. DB files should now auto-upgrade and you have all the existing settings etc. for add-ons (once you reinstall them) and thumb caches. Kodi settings may need to be tweaked if stuff changed. Always take a backup and move it off-box first so if something does go tits-up you can always reinstall LE-old and recover.
CE has never supported Meson8 hardware. OE/LE only ever supported the WeTek Core (S812) although in the past I've seen images for the Odroid C1 (S805) but S802 comes first. Search for dtech images.
Users frequently try to avoid setting a credential on shares believing "no passwords" to be easier. It is not, and how different OS with different versions of SMB/CIFS software will work gets a bit random. Set a credential and then configure the things that need to access the share to use it. This is how the software has been designed to work. This is how you get a consistent experience over all devices.
Users are frequently obsessed with "backing up the USB stick" using disk imaging tools when what they should be doing is "backing up the content on the USB stick" which is a fraction of the data size (as you noticed). LE provides a backup function in the settings add-on that does that. There is also a Kodi Backup add-on in the Kodi repo that does it too.
[ 3.211046] r8125: version magic '5.4.0-72-generic SMP mod_unload modversions ' should be '5.1.16 SMP mod_unload'^ the r8125 kernel driver is compiled for Linux 5.4, and:
[ 0.000000] Linux version 5.1.16 (msv@vm-server) (gcc version 8.3.0 (GCC)) #1 SMP Fri Apr 23 09:46:06 UTC 2021^ LE 9.2 uses Linux 5.1, so the module is not compatible. And:
ls: /usr/lib/firmware/rtl_nic: No such file or directory^ means even if you built the right kernel module, you did not put the firmware in the correct directory (because that's the correct one).
I wasn't able to check the contents of http://80.251.144.40/update/RTL8125B-9.005.01.tar.gz as the file didn't download for me, but my guess is the package contains a pre-built module for Linux 5.4 in addition to sources, and even if you do build the module from sources in the LE build system, the script is copying the wrong .ko into the image; giving you the bad magic message. I would download the sources from the awesometic Git repo as this doesn't contain pre-built modules.
On the firmware side; again I couldn't download the file to check contents but you're not moving the file to the correct location. I would not call ./install scripts writen for other build systems. Just do simple "cp" to the correct destination. Look at other packages and the format and $VARIABLE names to use for source/destination are simple to follow.
Run "dmesg | paste" and "ls -l /usr/lib/firmware/rtl_nic | paste" after startup and share the URLs generated. Also commit your local changes and push them to your GitHub repo so we can see the package you added and what they do.
It is nnot supported by anything we've ever officially produced and options will be VERY limited. There are some unofficial images that support Meson8 hardware; whether they work on a MXIII clone box is always a dice roll since there are 30+ manufacturers of externally identical boxes with different PCBs and combinations of components inside. You'll have to search the forum for threads and experiment.
LE supports a wide variety of ARM SoC hardware devices. CE supports only Amlogic devices. The CE 9.2 release is probably the best option for the box right now. LE has experimental modern kernel images (see nightly test images) but there is curently no support for the onboard tuner hardware in the upstream kernel. Out of tree tuner and demod drivers exist (in rough format) but the V4L2 demux driver needs to be written from scratch and this is unlikely to be done anytime soon. CE has dropped support for GXBB devices in their K19 images, so the future is not straightforward .. LE is not ready and CE doesn't exist.
It's best to ask for CE help in their forums.