Posts by chewitt

  • Status of Old AML TV Boxes

    The S905 chip requires magic boot code in the first sector of emmc which is the same location for partition records, so in theory you can't have modern u-boot on emmc and then boot an OS that needs to read partition data from the same location; they are mutually exclusive. SD cards boot from a different offset which isn't an issue. So the box must boot from SD card and the only way to force that is to erase vendor u-boot from eMMC (else it's detected and used). NB: The Odroid C2 has some special boot firmware that solves this, but the firmware is packaged to hide how it's done and nobody ever figured it out.

    As the WP2 is going to boot LE11 from SD card in all scenarios there's not much difference between using the "box" image via vendor u-boot and the upstream u-boot image. See if the "box" image fits your needs first before doing anything more.

  • What is this hotdog build?

    Stuff is a bit broken right now due to not caring too much about old infra that broke itself (again) and people being super-busy with day jobs which is limiting time spent on the new infra which still needs some experimenting. Remember we're all just a bunch of volunteers doing this in our spare time for fun (allegedly) :)

  • Status of Old AML TV Boxes

    WP2 is usable with the LE11 codebase based on upstream Linux (currently 5.18.0); albeit with no support for the DVB tuners inside (as there is no support for them upstream) and HEVC decoding being a little unpolished. H264 is good, other codecs are mostly software decoded but that isn't a big deal. NB: That specific image contains upstream u-boot and to use it you must completely erase Android from the internal emmc storage while the "box" image can boot using the vendor u-boot that comes with Android on the emmc storage. Neither WP2 or box image can update an existing image/SD card, a new/clean one is required.

    It's not clear/decided whether Amlogic support is formally resurrected for LE11 as newer hardware has some major issues to solve, but there are no plans to stop nightlies.

  • MariaDB add-on, Docker containers - is it safe to backup while running?

    I worked in IT for 25+ years. I would make zero assumptions that any developer expected their code to run in a container on a cheap ARM board device and considered how that might affect transactional integrity in backups. That said, the rate of change in MariaDB from Kodi use is probably low enough that you will get away with our backup process. The best thing to do with backups is a) take them regularly, b) store them off the device that can go wrong, c) prove you can restore them too (not all the time, but occasionally).

  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

    Quote from gertler

    So does LIbreElec work now with the zero 2 w?

    LE11 nightly images will boot/run on the board, but will probably deliver a weak Kodi experience for two reasons. First, 512MB RAM just isn't really enough for Kodi 20 and a good overall experience and we see the same on other 512MB systems which is why the project has chosen to drop official support for all hardware with under 1GB RAM. Second, the newer RPi codebase no longer supports all the "clever but hacky" optimising done to OMX/MMAL in the past (these no longer exist in Kodi) so HEVC will be a problem. The simple reason there are deliberately no official LE 9.2.x images for the Zero2 is: we didin't want to add support for something in LE9.2 that we already dropped support for in the next release (LE10). TL/DR: You can boot LE11 but don't expect it to be great and when it isn't, don't expect support.

  • LibreELEC on Firestick?

    Zero2W is an awkward one for people. As it's 512MB it really needs the older LE codebase which is lighter on lower spec hardware, but at the same time it launched after we've stopped all work/effort on that codebase. It's not particularly hard to add support for it (although users in that forum thread seem to have done things the hard way) but we deliberately chose not to spin an official image with support; because we already decided to drop support for <1GB devices in LE10+ .. so we don't want add support and encourage people to purchase Zero2W boards when we effectively already discontinued support for them. It's not a bad board, but people have high expectations and it's still low-spec so we have to be sensible about the amount of work we create for ourselves.

  • Clone to a (slightly) smaller disk for RPi4

    Cloning requries you to duplicate the entire filesystem, and filesystems have all kinds of checks and such to detect corruption; hence when the size of source and target aren't the same it all goes wrong. Instead make a backup and then restore it to the target; this way you are working only with the content of the filesystem and not the entire disk. The content of the filesystem is a lot smaller, more manageable and thus the process is also quicker.

    TL/DR; learn how to use tar .. make a backup, then restore the backup. LE settings has this capability built-in, although it only grabs specific folders (/storage/.kodi, /storage/.cache, /storage/.config) not all folders.

  • LibreELEC on Firestick?

    It seems you love unsupported low-spec hardware. Note that LE 9.2.6 (or 9.2.8) will not run on a Zero2W because it was launched some time after we released the last LE 9.2.x image so the image doesn't include the required firmware and other boot bits. In theory it can run LE11 images (nightlies) but it will probably run rather 'meh' due to low RAM on that model; we decided to officially not support anything with less than 1GB starting with LE10 to avoid those kinds of support issues (sound familiar?). That guidance is documented in release notes for LE10 and such (that we write and nobody reads). There is also a thread around here with some people flailing around the process of trying to backport Zero2W support to the older codebase, but I stopped reading that thread after a while as it made my head hurt.