Posts by chewitt

Quote from Hauke

Oh, that doesn't sound too promising... I was not aware that amlogic is that unsupportive... Thanks for explaining.

Amlogic aren't at the front of the charge towards V4L2 but they aren't last in the race either and I wouldn't call them unsupportive. There is ongoing effort from them, but as is often the case, their "open source" development is done behind closed doors and even when you have direct contact with Engineering staff (as we do) it can be difficult to track where things are and things often just appear without announcement.

There will be a boot time improvement (to your always on device) using the internal storage, but the claimed benefit of faster I/O performance when browsing libraries etc. is negated when you use an SD card for storage because that's where Kodi stores it's DBs and thumbnail images and all the read/write activity happens. If you're not going to see the main benefit you might as well avoid all the complexity of trying to make a split setup and have an easy life. So, just run LE from the SD card.

The install.sh script references in the shop URL that you shared suggest it requires "out of tree" driver modules to be installed, and the only mention of "Aoide" that I can find in the Raspberry Pi kernel is Add Aoide DAC II Driver by howardqiao · Pull Request #1559 · raspberrypi/linux · GitHub which was not merged due to code licensing issues. It can probably be made to work with a custom image, but we don't provide custom images

Login to the Pi (server) and learn how to use the 'sed' command to bulk rename files. Job done.

The / root partition is just a virtual filesystem comprised of the contents of the kernel.img and SYSTEM files; which you already have (or they are in /flash, or in the install folder within the build.blah components of build-system) so there's no need to go around dumping stuff.

The (final) answer is no, because this would require a USB port to remain in a powered state while the box is off, and manufacturers of cheap Amlogic boxes do not invest in the power circuitry that's required to make that happen.

I'm not sure why people expect pre-Alpha state software to be error free.

Create a new SD card, insert the card and power on. Now press the power button on the remote during boot and it will alternate between booting from the SD card and the internal eMMC (it's not NAND, despite the on-screen message). The boot device selection persists until you change it.

To migrate data; make a backup and move it off box, then restore it to the SD card after initial setup has been completed.

Quote from harsszegi

Is there any guide which lists what is the minimum featureset from the Linux kernel that is needed for LibreElec to work?

The answer would be device and kernel specific (as is the nature of kernels) so the best source of documentation is our GitHub repo. We are not as minimal as we started out, but we're still a lightweight distro.

Some of the devs have N1 boards now, so support of some kind will be worked into the general RK recipe.

We prefer not to get wallpapered with forum spam, which is why the word is in a filter list. Just use HID, we know what it stands for and it requires less typing.

You can explore "connmanctl" options

Amlogic does not provide a V4L2 driver for any of their current hardware. In the long-term they will probably write one for their next generation AX chips but I doubt they will ever spend $$ to create one for the current GX series. To support GX era chips the focus will be an FFmpeg module which allows Kodi to handle rendering while FFmpeg deals with decoding - this is how the Rockchip RKMPP pipeline is being implemented.

At the moment i'm experimenting with a WeTek Hub on 4.14 kernel, but mostly to find/fix build system quirks and ensure the mainline device trees are correct. I can look at the Kodi GUI, but there is only software decoding, which isn't practical for real-world use.

HiSilicon appears to have reasonable mainline kernel support and we are always interested in seeing LE run on new hardware, but so far nobody in the community leapt at the opportunity to spend lots of hours figuring out how to make that happen. The current dev team has its hands full so for HiSilicon support to happen someone needs to volunteer themselves. If not we'll get there eventually.. but no timescales.

For early boot messages you'll need a UART cable connected to the UART header pins on the PCB; assuming the board has the header installed (if not, some pins can be soldered). None of the current "devices" in our buildsystem use Mali400 so that may also require some plumbing changes.

The mistake most people make is tweaking things in the master branch instead of a local 'topic' branch. If you use a topic branch it becomes simple to fetch our "upstream" changes and rebase your modifications against the latest changes. If you tweak in our master branch, each time we modify the same file(s) you end up having to manually reapply them.

Quote from Menion

Anyhow without a mainline support for OpenGL (either close or open source) it is of no use for Kodi

There are some progress for Mali400 GPU, but it would cover only some of the allwinner SoC

The lima driver has some early support for Mali450 now but it's far too early to get excited. Meanwhile, towards the end of last year Allwinner gave Free Electrons permission to redistribute libMali blobs for some SoC(s). Permission implies the blobs have been licensed, which was not previously clear and thus prevented distro's like LE from using them in anything public.

If you are using Kodi on a Samsung phone you are not running Kodi on LibreELEC and you are in the wrong forum.