SteeMan
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Posts posted by SteeMan
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@geekinlinux your post is now in the correct location. And if you have read the responses written to you so far, it should be obvious that the CPU you have (H616) is a new cpu and there is no support for it yet. I would recommend coming back in 6 months or a year to see if there has been progress on support for the CPU you have.
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Welcome to the world of Armbian on TV Boxes!
TV Boxes are not officially supported by the Armbian project. This "TV Box" sub forum is for users interested in experimenting with Armbian on TV Boxes.
Overall you will be best served if you set your expectations low as to what you might be able to accomplish with your TV Box and Armbian. Specifically you should think of your TV Box as a potential linux server - *not* as a desktop replacement.
Feel free to post and ask questions in the TV Box forums if you are interested. But realize this is a peer-to-peer forum so you may or may not get an answer. Don't expect or demand support as there are only a handful of people that participate in these forums and they are all donating their time.
Search is your friend. There is a lot of historic information stored on this site. Your question has likely already been asked previously. However, a lot has changed over time and therefore be prepared for a lot of the information you find by searching the forums to be outdated and in some cases just plain wrong. Even though that may be the case, please search the forums first before posting a question. It shows you are willing to invest the time to do your part and makes those of us who volunteer our time to answering questions more likely to want to help you.
Amlogic (S9xx) based TV Boxes
1. There is a community build for Amlogic based s9xx TV Boxes - The key being community - so please contribute to make improvements
2. A single developer (@balbes150) had worked years on getting things to the state they are.
3. As of October 14th, 2020 balbes150 removed support for Amlogic CPUs, so that is the last active build from him4. 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.
5. You really shouldn't expect things like Wi-Fi, bluetooth, remote control, etc. to work.
6. There is a very small number of people on this forum/club that are able to provide any guidance.
7. Most likely no one on this forum owns your specific box and therefore generally can only provide vague guideance.
8. If you get this working on your box, it will likely only be useful for server type tasks, maybe a little light graphical desktop usage, but do not expect video playback, etc.RockChip (rk3399, rk3328, rk3288, rk3228, etc) based TV Boxes
These are probably the best supported TV boxes currently. They have the most active developers. Feel free to post in the Rockchip TV Box sub forums your questions.
Allwinner (H6, H616, H313) based TV Boxes
There is no ongoing effort to support Allwinner based boxes. Occasionally a developer will respond to a question, but in general if this is what you have, you will be expected to do a lot of work on your own, so you better be comfortable doing development for these type of boards. You aren't likely to find anything that you can just install and have work.
Other Comments
The official recommendation from the Armbian project would be to not use TV Boxes and use officially supported SBCs. Taking this approach will likely result in an easier time, less hassle, better support and likely a more fully functioning device.
There are reasons you may choose to want to use unsupported Armbian on TV boxes, for example here are some of my ( @SteeMan ) reasons:
1) It is a challenge and therefore a learning opportunity. I would never have learnt to build my own linux kernels from source if I was still exclusively using x86 hardware. If you want a challenge you will find it here.
2) Price vs specs. The Android TV boxes are built to be cheap consumer devices. They are produced in larger quantities which drives down the per unit price. You will generally not be able to get the same level of hardware for the same price with a standard SBC. But that cheapness comes with - no support by the manufacturers and potentially sub-standard components. If the manufacturers goal is to sell the lowest price box they are likely cutting corners somewhere to make that happen.
3) emmc is standard. TV boxes always come with internal storage while most SBCs do not. Again from a price/performance standpoint having internal emmc storage vs running off an SD card is a plus. emmc storage *should* be faster and more durable than storage on an sd card. The caveats here being that this is one of the areas that the manufacturers may cut corners. For example I have two TX3 mini boxes that are supposed to have 16GB of emmc memory (like the other TX3 mini boxes I have), but they were instead manufactured with cheaper nand memory for which there is no mainline kernel support. There is no visible difference between the identically packaged boxes that had emmc vs those that came with nand, other than opening the case and looking at the physical chips on the boards.
4) cases come standard. TV boxes always come with cases, whereas for SBCs that is an extra cost. For my uses having a case is a big improvement vs not having one. A downside if that these cases are not necessarily well designed to provide adequate cooling. So depending on your use case, overheating might be a problem.
5) While I own both SBCs and TV boxes, I personally find the TV boxes work best for my needs (running server based software) and I enjoy the challenge of getting them running and keeping them running with the great underlying work that the Armbian project is doing to build on top of.
If you have the correct expectations (set your expectations low) are looking to learn and are up for a challenge these are fun things to work with. And I look forward to working with you on these forums.
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@Matt Neapolis You posted your question in a forum for submitting bug reports. I have moved your post to the TV Box club forums.
To try to answer your question, you have the wrong tool for the job. You really need a SBC not a TV box. Controlling outside devices is generally done via gpio pins which isn't something TV boxes expose because that isn't what they are designed for. A proper SBC will have pins to your hearts content to interface with other devices. Having said that, while I've never heard of anyone using a TV box to do what you are asking, that doesn't mean it isn't possible. Someone around here may have other knowledge.
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Moved post to the correct forum.
@Craig Jameson My first word of advise is to read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
The instructions you are looking for are in the first post of the thread you reference. Note the warning in that post that says if you have used coreelec you will need to restore your box to original firmware before being able to use armbian as coreelec messes with the boot loader in way incompatible with the armbian approach.
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@hali Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You should not expect to get wifi working on a TV box. I own 6 different kinds of TV boxes and don't have wifi working on any of them. You might get lucky, but if you have already searched the forums and not found anyone sucessfully using wifi on your box, it probably isn't going to happen.
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@Tariq Khan Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You don't mention what requirements you have in a box. Apparently you need working wifi, which will be a challenge in a low end box as that is one area manufacturers cut costs. As part of cutting costs is any support or source code for the cheap wifi chips used.
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Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
What you are currently running is a vendor kernel - i.e. a heavily patched kernel that isn't maintained. The builds you are trying to use are mainline kernel based. Because of lack of vendor support, the mainline kernels while maintained and supported are often missing functionality that existed in the vendor kernels. Add to that the vendor kernels were written to run android not general purpose linux. The last comment I would make is that because the mainline kernels are distinct from the vendor kernels, the dtbs are not compatible across them as a lot has changed between 3.14 kernel days and 5.10 kernel days.
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2 hours ago, geekinlinux said:
im using ``sun50iw9p1`` i think `h616` does this image work and which dtb and u-boot file should i use.
@geekinlinux This is the second post you have posted essentially asking the same question. You posted this in completely the wrong place (as this has nothing to do with a TX3 X3 box). Please follow common etiquette and post things in the proper place. Also I think you question was answered above by Werner who linked to a thread that states:
"Before complaining about an issue read this!
tl;dr: Put your Zero2 and/or any other H616 based device on the shelf and WAIT for proper support to come. And no. There is no ETA. Assuming usable state end 2021/beginning 2022"
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@PabloR Welcome to the armbian forums. If you haven't already please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first/
I don't have your hardware so I can't provide any further guidance, other than the fact that it looks like the dtb files you are using don't correctly match your hardware.
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@Alexx
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@menelike So if I understand your posts correctly, you have a working environment with a legacy 3.x kernel. You are looking for something newer. So you tried a current build with a 5.x kernel and it didn't work. So now you are trying to hack your 3.x install to get a 5.x kernel working in that environment?
The 3.x legacy kernels are essentially unsupportable as they rely on a lot of vendor supplied code that isn't maintained. The 5.x kernels are using mainline linux without all the crap. The problem is that vendor support for mainline linux is minimal and therefore things that work on a legacy kernel will not work on mainline. If you can't get your box to work on a 5.x based kernel on a clean install, you aren't likely to be able to move to a mainline based kernel. The legacy kernel is significantly different than the mainline code base. Formats for things like the dtb have changed a lot, such that the 3.x dbt isn't likely to be very helpful working with a 5.x kernel.
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@Scrooge69 Welcome to the armbian world and your first post in the forums.
I unfortunately don't have much information in response to your questions. balbes150 who created the builds referenced in this thread has moved his focus to other projects (the StationPC M1 and P1 boxes). I don't own a rk3328 based device so I have no personal experience with them. If you look at the recent activity in this thread there isn't anyone actively engaged currently supporting boxes like the one you have. The best I can recommend is to try using the images linked in the thread and try things out. Since you are puttimg the images on an SD card it won't hurt your device to test and experiment. (I wouldn't recommend installing anything onto your emmc memory however).
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By clean copy I mean a fresh install of:
20 hours ago, menelike said:Armbian_21.02.0-trunk_Aml-s812_bullseye_current_5.10.0_.img.xz
I am assuming you are running from SD card, so install the build on a different SD card and see how well your box works with a recent build/kernel. Once you have established a baseline of a working 5.10 environment then you can decide how you can get the box to have what you want on it by moving data between your old SD card and new SD card.
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@lcapriotti My TX3 X3 (BZ version) using meson-sm1-sei610.dtb successfully is shutting down on 'shutdown -h now' and poweroff, and is correctly rebooting on reboot when I tested this morning. I know that sometimes it fails to reboot, but it was cooperating this morning.
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@menelike Have you tried to install a clean copy of a build with a mainline kernel to see if that works on you box? My recommendation would be to perform a clean install and then migrate over anything you need from the old 3.x kernel based install. There is no upgrade path for what you are trying to do, so many things have changed overtime that I wouldn't be confident that you will ever end up with a stable environment.
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22 hours ago, aminders said:
I'm working on getting WiFi working
Most of these boxes have a sp6051p wifi chip which doesn't have a supported driver in mainline kernels, so wifi isn't an option.
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@chinhut I created a thread about this topic (failure to reboot sometimes) last week as it seems to be a common issue. IF you have any thoughts to add, please do so in that thread: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16837-problems-rebooting-amlogic-based-boxes-from-emmc/
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No hardware decoding. Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You should not be expecting to use TV boxes running armbian for heavy desktop work i.e. video.
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Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You can run the balbes150 build on an amlogic s905w based X96 mini. Use the October 14, 2020 build and follow the instructions in the first post in this thread:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/12162-single-armbian-image-for-rk-aml-aw-aarch64-armv8
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The language of this forum is English. Please use a translation tool.
1 hour ago, Fionda 4 said:Salve a tutti, sono nuovo di questo forum e vorrei sapere se ho aqcquistato un prodotto valido e cosa ci si puo fare con x96 mini.
Grazie....Hi everyone, I am new to this forum and I would like to know if I have purchased a valid product and what can be done with x96 mini.
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theoretically yes. If you search the forum you will find some discussions on this. I don't know how likely you will be to get something displayed. I try to find boxes that don't have a display as from my perspective it is a waste of components that have very little practical value when running a linux distribution.
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On 1/20/2021 at 3:49 AM, lgranie said:
- format /boot in ext4
A couple of thoughts/questions on this. First why do you want to do this? I understand some of the limitations of having /boot be on a fat filesystem, but is there some specific thing you need this for?
Second, this is likely not going to be easy as the amlogic TV box booting process is tied to the fact that /boot is on a fat partition. If you look at aml_autoscript, s905_autoscript, emmc_autoscript they are coded with /boot being on a fat filesystem (i.e. using 'fatload'). If your goal is to get the standard armbian kernels to install cleanly on a /boot fat filesystem, then it may be easier to get armbian fixed. Theoretically armbian supports /boot on a fat file system (there is code in the scripts to allow that), but it likely isn't tested much.
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Note: @lgranie reported success in using standard armbian kernels (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16845-efforts-to-improve-video-performance-on-meson64-based-tv-boxes/?tab=comments#comment-117863)
and he is now moving forward with testing video performance improvements on the new kernels
x96max : from balbes images to linux-image-current-meson64
in Amlogic CPU Boxes
Posted
The fix for this would be on the armbian side (for the linux-image-current-meson64 package). It is a one line fix in the postinst script. I plat to submit a PR for this fix when I get a chance.