Posts by chewitt

Sadly there is nobody anywhere working on mainline kernel support for the 8726MX chipset.

kernel-firmware: pick BT firmware for USB/QCA9377 cards by chewitt · Pull Request #4327 · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv · GitHub

^ once this is merged to our master development branch it will be picked into a collection of backports for LE 9.2.3, so once you bump to that you won't need the extra files in /storage/.config/firmware. Enjoy

Great. Can you confirm which BT device worked - onboard or USB?

Kodi DSP development stopped because it was a one-man effort (nothing unusual in Kodi land) and that individual took a break due to research and work things in real-life. However, they surfaced again recently and said they would be resuming where they left off. I didn't see anything yet, but DSP may yet be revived. Removing it was still the right decision as it's was incomplete and it's been ~two years.

mkdir -p /storage/.config/firmware/qca
cd /storage/.config/firmware/qca
wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/plain/qca/nvm_usb_00000302.bin
wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/plain/qca/rampatch_usb_00000302.bin
reboot

^ run those commands and you should have the right firmware. If you confirm it works, it's trivial for us to add the firmware into a future LE release.

let us know..

NIC drivers should be as simple as editing the kernel defconfig in projects/Generic/linux/linux.x86_64.conf and re-running the build process. Get a working image first and then make the change.

LE 9.2.3 will come sometime shortly after Kodi ships v18.7 .. which has no scheduled date (when there's enough changes to justify a release).

Plan B .. is boot from an Ubuntu Live/Rescue USB and use gparted or similar to shrink the existing /storage partition and then grow the /flash partition with boot files. It will be painfully slow, but it can be done. Then you can do a simple update from OE to LE. I'd probably do the initial step to LE 8.0 as this the same era as the last OE release, and then make a backup of the Kodi config before doing an update to 9.2.2. As a rule Kodi updates fine from older releases, but there is usually some add-on breakage and that's where you're likely to hit roadbumps. If you have a backup on local disk, it's easy to experiment and tweak the pre-update config until things are successful.

LE 8.2.5 is the last/latest available version for Meson 8b hardware - although in the past we only supported specific devices and yours is not one of them; hence it has a "community" created image installed. We dropped support for Meson 8* devices some time ago as the hardware is old and the original vendor kernel (Linux 3.10) became difficult to support. There are ongoing efforts in the Amlogic community to provide mainline (current) Linux kernel support for Meson 8/8b/8m2 devices again, so in the future it might be possible to run something current again, but not right now.

For clarity.. can you share "route" and "ifconfig" details before/after.

[    3.392029] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for qca/rampatch_usb_00000302.bin failed with error -2
[    3.392032] Bluetooth: hci0: failed to request rampatch file: qca/rampatch_usb_00000302.bin (-2)

^ hardware is detected but firmware is missing. I'll see if I can find it..

actually.. linux/btusb.c at master · torvalds/linux · GitHub says it should be supported on the kernel side.

can you run "dmesg | paste" .. let's see if there's messages about missing firmware; share the URL

The fix should be in the 9.2.2 (Generic only) image.

See if you can find it here: kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git - Repository of firmware blobs for use with the Linux kernel .. If yes, it's trivial to add.

If not, find it from somewhere else and create /storage/.config/firmware/firmware.fw .. whatever folders/filenames that exist under firmware/ will be mapped to /usr/lib/firmware on rebooting .. so you can self-fix. Check "dmesg" to make sure the driver is actually present in the kernel. If it is you'll see errors for missing firmware. If not, kernel modules will need to be enabled to provide the driver - this requires the image to be recompiled.

QCA9377 is not currently supported in the kernel bluetooth tree. I've been looking at what config is missing/neeed to add support for Amlogic SDIO devices, but this is not a huge priority for me at the moment.

This is as far as I've got (not a huge effort): WIP: Bluetooth: hci_qca: Add compatible for QCA9377 · chewitt/linux@ffd3f65 · GitHub

after a clean boot

journalctl > log

route >> log

then stop wireguard (make the internet work again) and:

cat log | paste

share the URL here

One of the few benefits to the current Covid-19 situation is the one-man Meson 8 mission (Martin Blumenstingl) has been able to spend some quality time with an Odroid C1+ board. For some time we (mostly me) have been responding to WeTek Core and Odroid C1 user posts saying "upstream support is in reasonable shape, but there is no HDMI driver, we're waiting for a eureka moment to happen" .. and well, that eureka moment has finally happened

Before people get too excited, there is a big difference between "look mum, we made pictures on-screen" and "let's invite the unsuspecting public to use this stuff.." and there's still a lot of work needed to make things usable, and reliable on a wider range of hardware. Today we are showing one boot on one device, and lots of code stunt props were used.

The first video shows literally the first boot of an experimental AMLMX image loosely basaed on LE master with a mainline Linux kernel shortly before 5.7-rc1 (shows as 5.6) along with the FOSS mali GPU driver (lima) and Kodi 19 pre-Alpha.

The second video shows Martin in the GUI trying to remember where the system info screen is:

You'll need to share a debug log for anyone to comment on add-on issues - especially since we mostly see "updated my add-ons and everything broke" type issue descriptions with piracy add-ons, and those issues are not our problem to solve.