SteeMan

Read the FAQ, don't expect much to work beyond the basics. The display isn't working on any amlogic tv boxes using these builds. Per the FAQ: "4. Expectations should be set low (i.e. don't expect anything to work) but if you do get the box to boot, get HDMI and wired ethernet to work, you are doing good."

For any chance of getting help on this, you need to provide some information. What vfd screen are you talking about? What do you mean by 'not working'. What are you trying to do with this screen? Also, please read the FAQ item on overall armbian TV Box status: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first

That isn't an official armbian release it is some fork of offical armbian. You need to direct your question to the person who created that release. We can't help you here as we know nothing about that code.

Armbian comes with three levels of linux kernels in general (not all boards support all types). edge = "bleeding edge" or development kernels, not supported, meant for testing only; current = the currently supported stable kernels; legacy = either a vendor supplied kernel (often not maintained) or an older stable mainline kernel, generally not supported but provided for testing/compatibility reasons. As @Werner stated above you want to install a 'current' kernel. In the list you showed, you are only showing 'edge' kernels. You need to select one that uses the word 'current' where you are seeing 'edge' in the listing.

armbian-config lets you switch kernels

@mat Thanks for your willingness to work on this. If what you are saying is correct, then the linux kernel already being shipped for all amlogic boards should support this specific cpu (I don't believe there is a special kernel built for the vim1s). Then the issues boil down to dtb's and u-boot. Ideally this should be incorporated into the aml-s9xx-box builds. The most difficult part is likely to be the u-boot.

@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.

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.

@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.

@Jens J. If you could package this into a PR then everyone could benefit from your hard work

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.

That is not an Armbian image. That is a fork of armbian and you need to get support from the location you downloaded your image from. We can only help here with genuine Armbian images.

Topic moved and appropriate tag added.

This is not the file name for an genuine Armbian image. You will need to look for support from where ever you downloaded this non-armbian image.

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.

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.

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.

What firmware is installed then?

This is the uboot you want to use. I updated the amlogic installation instructions over the weekend to add the cpu to uboot and dtb family maping information.

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).

@adrian0541 I want to point you to the following FAQ post to make sure your expectations are set correctly: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first/

See my post directly above for more info on this.

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.

Moved all of the content from the install instructions thread dealing with booting issues on new releases to this new thread.

@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.