I also just freshly installed 8.0 on a X86_64 platform and don't get lirc to work.
I use a lirc-server in the network and starting lirc from autostart like this helps to get irw showing me all the keypresses:
mkdir -p /var/run/lirc
/usr/sbin/lircd -c infrared-pi -O /storage/.config/lirc/lircd_options.conf /storage/.config/lirc/lircd.conf
..just kodi is not picking it up, it used to work for me like that.