Posts by chewitt

  • Latest LibreElec on Intel NUC and audio

    Hopefully the flashing situation will be resolved. We recently discovered via the Intel folks working on HDR support (Kodi is their test app) that Intel has an internal Linux tool for tthis; they are going to see if it can be cleaned-up and released. No promises, but fingers are crossed.

    Bugs in official Kodi add-ons should be reported to Team Kodi via their forums or a detailed bug report (follow the template) on GitHub.

  • Librelec on VIM KHADAS EMMC

    If you are using one of the nightly images from Index of / there is a tool called "emmctool" in the OS to help with installing LE to the internal emmc storage. In short, you need to boot from any image to an LE console and then run:

    emmctool w /path/to/LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-XXXXX-khadas-vim.img.gz

    The tool will then unpack and overwrite the existing contents of emmc storage with the specified image. If you are already booted from the AMLGX "box" image the tool is in the OS, and all you need to do is download the "khadas-vim.img.gz" suffixed image to /storage and run the command.

    The tool is considered experimental but has worked well for me in regular wipe/format boot tests. If it does screw up (it was writen by me so this is always possible) the provblem will be something wrong with partitions and naming. In this scenario you still end up with a working u-boot installed on emmc and can continue to boot from the "box" SD card to simply repeat the process.

    If you are using older "KVIM" images (our legacy codebase) .. support for them among staff is now rather limited and I would recommend you continue to run them from an SD card.

  • A64-plus

    Kodi support for newer Allwinner (and Amlogic, and Rockchip) hardware is a choreographed ballet of very recent kernels, mesa, ffmpeg and Kodi (19) items. You can backport kernel, mesa, and ffmpeg to an older LE release fairly easily, but then the Kodi version will not support the kernel drivers and ffmpeg correctly. TL/DR; You need to stick with LE master images. There has been a lot of indecision among add-on authors due to a long/protracted noegotiation about how to handle the Py3 version bump. There is now firm clairity on that from Team Kodi, and while not all authors will like the decision made, the decision has been made so the way forwards is clear, and that should result in more add-ons being converted.

  • Where is config.txt

    /flash/extlinux/extlinux.conf is not an equivalent to config.txt (RPi config commands won't work) but if you follow the instructions for Intel GPUs here Custom EDID [LibreELEC.wiki] the same process for forcing a specific edid.bin file (so the kernel drm framework always thinks an HDMI device is connected and powered) should work - Allwinner boards are also using the same kernel drm framework.

  • Video not playing on nightly Lafrite build

    FWIW .. I was playing the file from an NAS (SMB) device in the network using the low-spec on-board WiFi of the Hub. I'm not aware of any issues with USB read/write performance on Amlogic SoC's but I also never/rarely use local media with any low-power ARM devices; not because they're inherently bad, but because I swap between 20+ devices on a regular basis so everything's in a central place in the network to make that easier.

  • S805x build (lafrite)

    If you set defaults to -Os it will optimise the image for file size not "running in RAM size" which is the issue. LE sets -O2 which is sensible.

    And .. every couple of years some user discovers this wonderconfig they read about called zram, makes a lot of noise, and rushes off to do extensive performance testing that proves zram has negligible/zero benefit in our distro. Boards under 1GB don't have enough RAM to really benefit from loading more things into RAM and 1GB+ we already run everything in a ramdisk so forcing zram use only adds additional overhead.

  • S805x build (lafrite)

    If I add "mem=512M" to kernel boot params on an S905 device Kodi faults with this error ^

    So unless there are improvements to RAM utilisation in the OS or specifically the video stack, Kodi cannot run on 512MB LaFrite devices. I've flagged it to a couple of the developers, but since we are refusing to support 512MB Allwinner devices as being "too small for sensible Kodi use" and the long-term message on RPi 512MB hardware is similar (we will drop support for RPi0/1 sometime soon) I wouldn't expect a surge of activity .. sorry.

  • libmali and recent kodi: missing symbols

    ^ as long as these are set in device options you shouldn't need to change anything else in the build-system *BUT* you will need to make a clean build (remove the entire build.LibreELEC* folder) to ensure the kernel is not build with lima and that all userspace symlinking and compile-linking against EGL and GBM libraries is handled correctly. Your description makes me think you've built with a mesa configuration and then done the switch to mali without doing a clean build after?

    NB: It's also worth bumping to mesa HEAD to pick-up all the improvements made since 20.0.x .. lima is still under very active development with small incremental improvements on a weekly basis. It would be a shame to go back to blobs.

  • Moved from OpenELEC to LibreELEC - Wake on LAN and IR no longer working

    Here's my $0.02 theory: Over time the kernel has evolved better power management which means more hardware can go into deeper sleep states. This is great for power efficiency during suspend/sleep but means you might have to apply some configuration to ensure the NIC (or entire device) remains at a high enough sleep state to still receive the WOL packet. I have a huch that the move from older to newer kernel effects the change. I haven't been using x86 kit for aeons so have no idea how you'd prevent deeper suspend/sleep, but it's something to investigate.