Posts by chewitt

  • VDR Skin in FrameBuffer - Without X11 ?

    You need to look into the long-term technical direction that LE is taking with Kodi (and Kodi on Linux is adopting) and then use a mainline Amlogic kernel with a few patches (as changes are still working their way upstream) to have a proper DRM/KMS environment that will support GBM/V4L2 or GBM/Wayland. The code pieces for this are available and working today (not flawless, but useable). Qt also has GBM/V4L2 support written by one of our team members so that Plex (a Qt app) can use the same GBM/V4L2 environment for their embedded distro that is based upon LE's codebase. In the long-term (LE 10.0) Raspberry Pi will also switch to GBM/V4L2 using the open-source VC4 (V3D) drivers.

    The amlogic branch in my GitHub repo is rebased frequently but should give you a working mainline codebase to work from. If you compare that branch with the amlogic-meson-mali package in older 4.17 and 4.16 branches you can see how to build it with Wayland support; I dropped the Wayland dependency recently as Amlogic started shipping a GBM 'dummy' file (at my request) that doesn't require it in the latest buildroot.

    IMHO any major development needs to use the modern frameworks that are now in-place and your project will not have to reinvent the wheel when we drop support for older BSP kernels in the near future. All major work done against vendor BSP kernels is a wrong move.

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    Quote from AGLyons

    I'm one of those Nvidia users ATM. Can we take what you wrote to the bank? About "everything except nVidia" being supported? If that's the case, from what I understand an AMD RX560 should be supported and provide 10bit H265 in addition to 4k60 and HDR. If that is the case I would not have a problem moving to AMD for the LE HTPC.

    Allwinner, AMD, Amlogic, Broadcom, Intel, NXP, Qualcom, Rockchip and Samsung (with specific GPU's/SOCs and not universal coverage) are on the current supported list for the GBM pipeline and by the time we get to K19/LE10.0 there are probably others too. That's the nice thing about working with proper standards. You need to understand that Linux is still evolving support for HDR though; so individual drivers will be at different stages of progress and we're dumb passengers in that process. AMD looks a better bet than nVidia right now, but no promises.

  • LibreElec on Pivos Xios XS

    There has been negligible development for 8726MX in the last 12m and LE 9.0 will be the final release that we do for the couple of 3.10 kernel using devices that we currently support. Once we end support that will probably be the end of community interest in that era of devices. Sorry..

  • X99 TV BOX RK3399 Mali - T860MP4 4GB RAM + 32GB ROM

    The device tree file describes the hardware of the box and how chips are internally connected and the Linux kernel uses this to bring up support for the hardware. The majority of Android boxes follow SoC reference designs so the core layout is common and quite predictable, and our kernel is deliberately generic enough that it should run on most RK3399 devices, but unless you boot with the correct device tree file we may not initialise the hardware correctly; i.e. the box may not boot, or it might boot but you end up with missing Ethernet or Wifi, etc.

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    One of the design goals for K19 is the removal of all vendor proprietary interfaces. iMX6 is already gone and VDPAU/amcodec can be removed once the K18 release branch is forked. VAAPI gets a pass because it's no longer Intel specific (AMD and Allwinner will use it). One of the related design goals for LE10 is the removal of X11 and it's many dependencies.

    The next generation Kodi video pipeline based on DRM/GBM allows us to support 10+ different GPU/SoC types (everything except nVidia) under a single framework and code path. There is nothing to stop someone implementing EGL streams, but it's not going to be popular with the main Kodi architects (given the design goals) and so far nobody is volunteering to do the work.

    Unless that situation changes there will be a technical decision to terminate nVidia support after LE 9.0, and we are actively collecting stats on the number of installed devices with nVidia GPU's to quantify the impact of that decision. NB: If LE ends nVidia support you can still install drivers under Ubuntu or some other distro using Wayland or Xorg.

  • Docker restart policies

    Unless you manually turn containers off or the system runs out of disk space they will just keep running. If you are using the popular linuxserver.io containers a periodic reboot of the pi will result in updates to the containers being pulled from their repo.

  • Adding new Hardware (with already supported SoC)?

    "it depends" on how different the other OS is to the current RK 4.4 kernel. In some cases (same kernel codebase) the device tree might just work and life is simple. In other cases the current device tree probably contains the info you need to reinterpret things to a new one. Android != Linux and kernel version determines whether you're working in ancient greek or modern greek (so to speak).

  • Copy file to /lib/firmware/brcm

    I've recently been looking at brcmfmac sdio firmwares and current code will take firmware *files* that are placed in /storage/.config/firmware and append them to /usr/lib/firmware but it will not take a folder structure, so /storage/.config/firmware/brcm/* will be ignored.

    Can you share (pastebin) the .txt file?