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SteeMan

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Posts posted by SteeMan

  1. 10 hours ago, Jens J. said:

    I see armbian-firmware is around 16MB vs 300+MB of armbian-firmware-full. Luckily, I don't think the firmware has changed on the QCA9377 much since 2020's commit. I do see your point though. Is there some way to have the armbian-firmware build process dynamically pull the latest from upstream kernel for the selected drivers/sections, without doing the whole "kitchen sink" approach of armbian-firmware-full, which is a bit excessive for some devices with limited storage?

    @rpardini What is the recommended approach to incorporating firmware from mainline into the armbian-firmware package (other than copying the files and then running the risk of divergent files over time if they change in mainline)?  Some sort of buildtime reference that copies the current mainline files over? What was done here https://github.com/armbian/firmware/pull/63 seems brittle to me.

  2. 10 hours ago, Jens J. said:

    Regarding learning, I'm using what you started with config/boards/aml-s9xx-box.tvb and adapting this to a new board type (mini-m8s-pro.tvb), along with adding dts at patch/kernel/meson64-edge/dt/meson-gxm-mini-m8s-pro.dts

    If there is further documentation on this process of adding new board support, especially around the amlogic flavors, to better guide me, I'd be happy to check that out

    For now I would suggest you just incorporate your changes into the existing s9xx-box.  Adding an entire new board comes with a much higher level of commitment on your part (expectations on being a maintainer for that board to keep it in the project).  Also since TV boxes aren't officially supported by Armbian, we try to have minimal impact on the build infrastructure.  Also by keeping these emlogic boxes under one umbrella, hopefully that leads to more community/developer support for all of them, as opposed to spreading them out as separate boards.  This can always be changed in the future if directions/needs change.

  3. @Jens J. I would suggest that you work on learning how to incorporate into the armbian build each of the components that you are modifying.

     

    I wanted to point out to you that armbian builds two different firmware files: armbian-firmware and armbian-firmware-full.  The install by default installs armbian-firmware.  The difference between the two is that armbian-firmware is a paired down set of firmware theoretically containing just the firmware needed for supported boards.  Whereas armbian-firmware-full is the complete firmware from the linux kernel plus any custom/added firmwares that are not mainlined.  So since you are just using what is in mainline, all you should need to do is install the full firmware package (apt install armbian-firmware-full).

    In your PR, since you copied from mainline, if mainline gets updates to those files, they will not be incorporated into armbian, so that is potentially a problem.

     

     

  4. 14 hours ago, sliver85 said:

    Armbian_23.08.0_amlogic_s905x_jammy_5.15.133_server_2023.10.02.img

    This is not an Armbian image.  This is a fork of armbian.  You need to ask for support from where you downloaded your image, we can't help you here as we didn't product that image.  IT is unfortunate that others use the armbian name without permission, and cause confusion among users.

  5. 18 minutes ago, sortinousn said:

    I used the Armbian image in the leeboy/armbian repository

    That would not be an armbian image then if it didn't come from official Armbian sources.  So this isn't really the place to discuss non-armbian builds.

  6. 2 hours ago, adrian0541 said:

    Is there way to obtain or to construct the correct DTB file from the original files on Android? (The files that came on the internal TV Box Memory)

    You can find clues in the android dtb, but the kernel implementations between the vendor custom kernel used for android and mainline kernel are significant different, so they in general are not compatible.

  7. 10 hours ago, markbox said:

    Armbian_23.11.0-trunk.105_Orangepi5_jammy_edge_6.6.0-rc1_xfce_desktop.img.xz

    In your current build, 'edge' is the build name is the branch you are using.  main is the correct build environment to pull.

    Depending on what your are trying to do, you probably need to spend some time learning the build system to understand how it works in order to accomplish your goals.  Your questions are very basic and come across as you haven't done your homework in reading the documentation and learning the build system.

    As you can probably tell from igor's response, Armbian survives on very few contributing developers who don't generally have time the hand hold newbies.  I don't know your situation, and am just reacting to the limited information at hand in this one post.

  8. On 9/16/2023 at 8:34 PM, adrian0541 said:

    How can I determine the type of hardware I need to search the drivers for? How do I know my Wifi, Ehernet and sound hardware?

     

    I've installed Hardinfo from the APT repository and made a scan of the hardware if it helps. I Also Installed AIDA64 on Android.

    Generally the best way to determine your hardware is to open the box and look at what chips are installed (but that sometimes in tv boxes isn't helpful as the manufacturers are known to use chips with fake markings).  The other thing to do is to hook up to the serial console and review the uboot output and early kernel output.

     

    With arm based tv boxes and boards the hardware is made available to the kernel via the dtb file.  So it is the dtb that maps the kernel to the on board hardware.  So if you aren't using a dtb explicitly designed for your board/box you won't get working features as the linux kernel won't know what the correct hardware is.  That is why with these tv boxes where there are only dtbs for a small handful of them that you are unlikely to get all features working on a box.  This is why the suggestion is to try all the dtbs and find the one that is closest to your hardware (i.e. has the most things working).

     

  9. As I mentioned earlier, there are issues with newer builds and the uboots currently shipped in the distributions (things 23.5 and later).  So as others have noted if you have as s905x2 or x3 box you currently should use a 23.2 or earlier build.

     

    With 23.5 armbian introduced a new build system.  So everything about the build process for armbian changed.  There are two changes that I am aware of that are or may be impacting the amlogic tv box builds. 

     

    The first change is that the FAT partition is created differently than the old build system.  There are comments in this thread that indicate that may be an issue, but I haven't dug into this to know for sure.

     

    The second change is that the build system moved from kernel uImage files to kernel Image files.  This is to standardize all the armbian builds onto the same file type.  A uImage file is the kernel  Image file processed by uboot tools to add some additional info to the executable.  This used to be required for uboot to boot a linux kernel, however newer uboots can load plain kernel Image files directly.  I think the issue with the u-boot-s905x2-s922 uboot is that that uboot doesn't have the support to load plain Image files built in.  The u-boot-* files come from the work of balbes150 when he used to support amlogic tv boxes.  So they are about 4 years old and need to be updated to follow changes in uboot.  I started, but haven't had time to do this yet.  If you have a current build (post 23.2) there should be a file in /boot/build-u-boot/readme.txt that talks about moving to newer uboots.  This is based on the work by hexdump originally.  If someone could pick up this work and submit PRs that would be very welcomed.  It would be a good way for a developer to get their feet wet in understanding a key part of the support necessary to make these amlogic tv box builds possible.

     

     

  10. @adrian0541  It would be helpful if you mentioned in this thread which box you have?  (I realize that you may have originally posted that information but after moving things around it isn't in this thread).

     

    Also to your original question, in the extlinux file you should just reference the /dtb/  directory (not the kernel specific one).  The install/upgrade to new kernels will potentially remove that kernel and replace it with a new one and then your box won't boot as that specific file will no longer exist.  The files in the /dtb/ directory are a copy of those for the latest installed kernel, so by using that directory you are isolated from upgrades.

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