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AndrewDB

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  1. Like
    AndrewDB reacted to balbes150 in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Pay attention, many S905 is used with legacy u-boot. Therefore, do not try to install the latest versions in eMMC. The regular u-boot will be destroyed and you will need to restore the firmware via a USB cable or from a bootable SD card.
  2. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from borygo77 in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Like for any other Android TV box, before you go writing the NAND, install TWRP and make a complete backup, or test the SD card recovery  / USB cable methods first.
    In other words, test that you can unbrick it before you do anything that might brick it. 
     
  3. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from Turgus in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    And yet again, duct tape saves the day!   
  4. Like
    AndrewDB reacted to Seasalt in Some benchmarks of an inexpensive S912 TV box running Armbian   
    Thanks for the great Benchmarks.
     
    Its always a delight to find out I managed to get the best bang per buck with my rapidly evolving collection of arm boards.
     
    The Mecool KM8  s912 is clearly a stand out Corelec Kodi player in terms of Bang per buck.
     
    I think the s922x for $65 will eat the s912-Armbian  market  once it is released as the Hard Kernel N2.
     
    One of the things I did not understand about Arm chip boards being used as Linux computers. Is the HUGE delay between the hardware being in-effect "released in a unfinished state" and the time it takes for the software to catch up.
     
    i.e. no VPU driver for s912 was solved in Corelec Kodi  by rapping the android VPU driver etc.
    Orange Pi PC2 did not have a Hardware Video driver solved by a massive reverse engineering project.
    The s912 was said to have 2.0ghz cores but it turned out to be 1.5ghz etc.
  5. Like
    AndrewDB reacted to Seasalt in Some benchmarks of an inexpensive S912 TV box running Armbian   
    My thinking and experimenting on this is is..
    Yes ..Passive cooling is a novel idea but these chips start to "cripple their performance if they get hottish"
     
    A simple $5 raspberry Pi Fan soldered in will provide enough cooling to KNOCK 10 degree's to 15 degree's Celsius off the temperature of the CPU close to full load. 70 degree Celsius will go to 55 Celsius.
     
    It will mean that you can play a HEVC x265 movie in "software" mode, with CPU utilization at 80-90% if you have to.
     
    PS If you are using the s912 board for Amateur Radio or Software defined Radio the fan directly soldered to the s912 TV will cause a slight hum and may need a small capacitor to quieten it.
     
    I have 3, KM8 Mecool s912. Two with fans one without.
     
    One is running a dedicated  Corelec version of Kodi and I run it fan-less but I suspect occasionally it gets too hot and the HEVC video slightly stutters. I can live with this as I do not want a fan noise whilst watching a video on Kodi.
     
    The other 2 Mecool KM8  I run Oleg's S912 Armbian..this is simply amazing with a fan I can run my software defined radio software at 3.2 MHz FULL  bandwidth (cpu utilization 70-80%) on a 5 volt low powered device at about 55degree Celsius. it is simply amazing.
  6. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from balbes150 in Armbian for Amlogic S912   
    Just wanted to report on the status of my three Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.
    - All three boxes have now had their firmware flashed with an older Android version which includes a u-boot that correctly boots 4.xx kernels. The u-boot version in the shipped factory firmware on this recent batch of Km8-P boxes would boot kernel 3.14.29 fine but would absolutely refuse to boot any 4.xx/5.xx kernel.
    - All three boxes are now running Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_20190211.img.xz with meson-gxm-q201.dtb. This release has proved to be exceptionally stable on these Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.
    - Two boxes are running Armbian from a Sandisk A1 SD card. On one box I have installed Armbian on the eMMC, simply executing the install.sh script did the trick without any problems.
    - I use these boxes in headless mode (no monitor, keyboard or mouse, access through ssh) as distcc compile nodes and they perform admirably. I can compile the Linux kernel in under 15 minutes on my compile farm.
    - These boxes run at a cool 38~42C (depending on room temperature) at idle and 72~76C under heavy load and do not require any special cooling. I have not observed any thermal throttling even under heavy load.
    - I have benchmarked the Km8-P using both sbc-bench and the Phoronix Benchmark Suite, see the thread I started on the subject of benchmarking an inexpensive S912 TV box. In summary, these Km8-P boxes place in the middle of the pack for single-threaded benchmarks and at the top of the pack for multithreaded benchmarks, and are the best in terms of performance per dollar compared to any other SBC, as of February 2019.
    - I have not tested any of the multimedia capabilities: audio, video decoding, 3D graphics acceleration, HDMI, etc.
     
  7. Like
    AndrewDB reacted to amirul in Some benchmarks of an inexpensive S912 TV box running Armbian   
    Thanks. They are all under 25USD when I got them on sale
    1. T95Z Plus 3Gb
    2. TX9 Pro 3Gb
    3. BM8 Pro 2Gb
    all running off sdcard. Didn't want to risk bricking them by installing to eMMC
     
    Maybe I'll try the Phoronix Benchmark Suite one of these days
  8. Like
    AndrewDB reacted to amirul in Some benchmarks of an inexpensive S912 TV box running Armbian   
    My S912's running Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_desktop_20190211
    1. T95Z Plus
    2. TX9 Pro
    3. BM8 Pro
    and yeah, smooth desktop
  9. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from balbes150 in Some benchmarks of an inexpensive S912 TV box running Armbian   
    There is no such thing as the "right" one, because each person has a different use case, some buy a TV box to use as a server, others for multimedia, etc...
    However, if people want to buy an Amlogic S912 SBC to experiment, I strongly recommend a Khadas Vim2. 
  10. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from balbes150 in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Completed tests:
     
    1. Previous u-boot (from file s905x-uboot.img in Armbian 5.75 image) : Image Armbian_5.76_Aml-s905_Ubuntu_bionic_next_5.0.0-rc7-next-20190219-g43dc36c94-dirty.img.xz boots fine on Km8-P (S912) with 1Gb RAM. Ethernet (wired) works erratically. USB does NOT work (kernel or dtb issue?)
     
    (Edit)
    2. u-boot.bin from deb package for S905: Image Armbian_5.76_Aml-s905_Ubuntu_bionic_next_5.0.0-rc7-next-20190219-g43dc36c94-dirty.img.xz boots BUT there is a kernel panic before prompt is reached (perhaps too tight memory timings?).
     
    (Edit)
    3. u-boot.bin from deb package for S912: does not boot. Error is in u-boot RAM detection, as before:
    BL2 Built : 14:59:36, Aug  9 2017. gxl ge8c6a83 - xiaobo.gu@droid12 set vdd cpu_a to 1120 mv set vdd cpu_b to 1050 mv set vddee to 1000 mv Board ID = 6 CPU clk: 1200MHz DQS-corr enabled DDR scramble enabled DDR3 chl: Rank0+1 @ 912MHz - FAIL DDR4 chl: Rank0+1 @ 1008MHz - FAIL DDR init failed... Reset... I am going to use Armbian Image 5.75 with kernel 4.20 with u-boot from file s905x-uboot.img in Armbian 5.75 image for a few days to test for stability and if I don't find any problems, I think I am going to install it in eMMC on my three Km8-P boxes, which I use mainly for kernel compiling.
  11. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from xispita in Compiling and booting mainline Linux for your S9XXX TV box   
    Just wanted to report that I have been experimenting compiling the kernel for Oleg's various Armbian images for S9XXX TV boxes and have managed to compile and boot mainline kernel, but this required a small change in Oleg's S905_autoscript in /boot.
    Basically I just added a  couple of lines that bootm the uImage if it is present. If there is no uImage it proceeds to booti Oleg's zImage:
     
    setenv boot_start_ml bootm ${kernel_addr} ${initrd_addr} ${dtb_mem_addr} if fatload mmc 0 ${kernel_addr} uImage; then if fatload mmc 0 ${initrd_addr} uInitrd; then if fatload mmc 0 ${env_addr} uEnv.ini; then env import -t ${env_addr} ${filesize};fi; if fatload mmc 0 ${dtb_mem_addr} ${dtb_name}; then run boot_start_ml; else store dtb read ${dtb_mem_addr}; run boot_start_ml;fi;fi;fi; I wrote two documents - 1. HOWTO compile the Linux kernel (either Oleg's patched kernel or mainline kernel straight from kernel.org) and 2. How to install the Linux kernel - that can be found here: 
    http://wiki.loverpi.com/faq:sbc:libre-aml-s805x-install-newly-compiled-kernel
     
    Right now I am running mainline 4.19.20 on a S905 TV box:
    andrew@mxqpro4k:~$ uname -a Linux mxqpro4k 4.19.20-adb9ml #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Feb 10 19:29:08 CET 2019 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/ Linux  
    andrew@mxqpro4k:~$ uptime 22:25:55 up 23:52,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    Note that there are two distinct ways to compile the Linux kernel for any S9XXXX TV box: you can cross-compile the kernel on a PC running Linux, or you can natively compile the Linux kernel on the TV box itself. I am routinely doing native compiles, using distcc on a build farm to speed compilation.
  12. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from xispita in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Hi xispita, the Linux kernel always reserves some memory for its internal use so it's impossible to have the full 1GB for applications. Also, sometimes it's possible to disable the video driver and recover some RAM without having to recompile the kernel, just by passing some arguments on the kernel command line (that's found in the file uEnv.ini in the BOOT partition on Armbian images).
    I would have to investigate this issue but have not had enough time yet. As soon as I have some news on this front I'll post here in this thread.
    You can also do some research on your side by googling "running linux headless command line parameters" or something similar to see if you find some relevant information. Surely somebody must have investigated this before! 
  13. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from balbes150 in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    With some further optimization, kernel compile times using distcc on my small S9XXX TV box build farm with 28 Cortex-A53 cores is:
     
    time make -j28 CC="distcc gcc" Image modules dtbs
     
    real    15m31.226s user    89m33.590s sys     10m34.380s
    More details here: http://wiki.loverpi.com/specs:sbc:distcc-kernel-compile
     
    This is all thanks to Oleg's great work on providing Ubuntu images for Amlogic S9XXX based TV boxes, so again, thank you Oleg for your amazing work. 
  14. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from xispita in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Hello xispita,
     
    Yes, the 3.14.29 kernel as configured by default reserves 256MB of RAM for video out of the installed 1GB. To get more RAM for these headless compile nodes I guess I have to recompile the kernel and disable video completely, but I have not tried it yet, it's on my TODO list. 
     
     And yes, these Km8P boxes only work with ethernet under Linux, the wifi is not available unless one is willing to hack a special device tree for them, but that's a lot of work and it's not guaranteed to work. Note that for a build farm, wifi is not recommended. On the other hand if you just need a TV box for multimedia applications, it's simpler to stay with Android.
  15. Like
    AndrewDB got a reaction from balbes150 in Armbian for Amlogic S9xxx kernel 5.x   
    Hello all,
    First I would like to thank Balbes150 for his amazing work. I am using his Armbian images on the five various Amlogic S9XXX TV boxes I have.
    Thank you very much, Oleg! Fantastic work! 
    What I have right now on my workbench:
    1) MXQ Pro 4k, S905, 1GB/8GB RAM/ROM, running Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 server 5.67 with kernel 4.19.7. I am using meson-gxbb-p201.dtb.
    2) M9C Max 4k, S905X, 2GB/16GB RAM/ROM, also running Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 server 5.67 with kernel 4.19.7. I am using meson-gxl-s905x-p212.dtb.
    3) 3 x Mecool KM8 P, S912, 1GB/8GB RAM/ROM, running Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 server 5.44 with kernel 3.14.29. I am using gxm_q201_1g.dtb. These boxes are used as a distcc build farm, which I have documented here: http://wiki.loverpi.com/specs:sbc:distcc-kernel-compile
     
    I can get the kernel to compile in just under 17 minutes on the build farm, instead of 44 minutes on a single S912 box or more than an hour on the S905/S905X boxes!
     
    All TV boxes are booting from Samsung EVO micro SD cards, and yes, it's important to use good SD cards, as repeatedly suggested in the Armbian documentation. 
     
    I have a USB serial cable soldered to my MXQ Pro 4k TV box, this has been very helpful to play around with u-boot.
     
    I have a question for anybody who also has a Mecool KM8 P S912 box: have you been able to boot any Armbian image with a 4.xx Linux kernel? What dtb file did you use? I have been unable to boot anything other than the 3.14.29 kernel on these S912 boxes. Thanks for any answer on this issue.
     
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