v-man

Well, I only got Kodi to launch under Weston. I had some sort of crash trying to start from a text console. Anyway some sort of magic GPU support is probably needed for this kind of system to support playing HD video, and apparently ARM systems don't usually support any of the standards, like VA-API. I also tried solid-runs new Debian (Buster) image, but could not get it to play video properly (although it is supposed to support it through gstreamer). Long story short: I gave up on the idea of using the cubox as a video player as well, reserving it for server purposes. On the rare occasion I want video for the projector I'll now just connect my AMD64 desktop system from 2012, which can play every format effortlessly.

Someone had a workaround for my bug report: The kernel command line parameter "cma=256M@2G" makes video acceleration work - at least on Fedora. On Armbian "weston-launcch" still only gave me a black screen. Video performance on Fedora is not great, playing full-hd material, though. I briefly tried Kodi, vlc, and mplayer under Weston... only Kodi worked, and only with 720p material the CPU usage was not 100%, so it was playing back smoothly. Solid-run just updated their Debian offer to Debian 10 this month - so I think I'm going to try that again too, as much as I'd like to have a completely free system.

Well, there was not an open bug anymore. For the reporter on the list the problem went away, for an unknown reason. So I just opened a new bug ticket: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111789 Let's see...

Thanks for the quick reply and the hints, Igor! I could not figure out what point you were making with the link to the Debian wiki's changelog, though. I did try installing Fedora, as announced in my previous post. Installation with the arm-image-installer is pretty simple (I even got the script to work in Ubuntu, and just had to expand the root partition manually). I tested "Fedora Minimal" from Fedora 30, which initially had a 5.0 kernel, then updated to 5.2. Indeed the behavior was pretty much like in armbian, especially after I had installed the graphics firmware from NXP. Again I got the "etnaviv-gpu 130000.gpu: command buffer outside valid memory window". Apparently etnaviv development is still quite active, and maybe the CuBox's problem was even reported on the developers' mailing list in June this year: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2019-June/224474.html Do you think it's worth writing a short bug report to that mailing list? I can't find a bug tracker...

I was somehow hoping the video problem was not kernel related, but maybe due to the older rest of the OS. Apparently the CuBox is quite an exotic system, and the user community is not that active. On the vendor's forum I see a screenshot of someone apparently having Kodi on etnaviv running, on this hardware. But the Debian wiki says about the CuBox: "On Debian 10/Buster GNOME defaults to Wayland and works out of the box." Unfortunately I don't get the serial console connected anymore, though, so I can't install Debian the normal way. I had it running some time ago, but I don't remember which cable or which other computer I used back then. The next thing I'd like to try is Fedora, using the arm-image-installer. Apparently it supports the mx6cuboxi. But that attempt will have to wait until the weekend.

So I did try a 5.3 kernel today, but the result does not look all to different from the 5.2 kernel available through apt already: http://ix.io/1Vr9 (is "etnaviv-gpu 130000.gpu: command buffer outside valid memory window" the cause of the Wayland failure?) All I did was checkout the repo, change 2 to 3 in the line KERNELBRANCH='branch:linux-5.2.y' in config/sources/cubox.conf, then run: ./compile.sh docker I had to answer a few questions about new kernel options, pretty much leaving all of them on default (usually N). Then I copied the debs from output/debs to the cubox (via scp), and installed them. So the build system is working nicely. Now I wonder what is the best way of updating to Ubuntu 19.04 (or 19.10 already)? I tried do-release-upgrade inside this Ubuntu 18.04 Armbian, but that lead to some errors:

I've "manually" compiled a kernel for the cubox-i before. I'd like to look at the Armbian build system, and see if I can get a Ubuntu 19.04 with kernel 4.3 out of it... but I won't have time to try before the next weekend. With the current Ubuntu 18.04 image from you (Armbian) XFCE seems to be working ok, but without video acceleration. I tried installing ubuntu-desktop (with gdm3), to get to a Wayland desktop, but again would not even get to a login prompt, like with Debian (Armbian Buster). I reverted to XFCE doing a "dpkg-reconfigure gdm3" (choosing "lightdm" in the dialogue). My use-case for the cubox is file, database, video recording, and audio server... with occasional video output, if possible. I currently don't need a desktop there. In fact a Kodi environment would be ideal.

Thanks for the quick reply, Igor! Though I was wondering I'd have to download a whole new image I gave it a try. My first attempt was with Armbian_5.94_Cubox-i_Debian_buster_next_5.2.10.Zz. Seeing I currently could not get a newer Debian, I tried Armbian_5.94_Cubox-i_Ubuntu_bionic_next_5.2.10.Zz instead. It is booting a nice desktop indeed. Something is not quite right, though. The crucial line from dmesg might be this: etnaviv-gpu 130000.gpu: command buffer outside valid memory window Also "xvinfo" says "no adaptors present" I know armbian is mostly intended to be a server system... still being able to use a video player on this device would be nice! I uploaded the Ubuntu armbian monitoring report also: http://ix.io/1UCv

Hi everyone, Armbian works well for me on a NanoPi Neo, and installing it on my Cubox i4 was straightforward... but I'd like to try a kernel newer than linux-image-cubox (version 4.14), to get improved video support, and both linux-image-dev-cubox (version 5.2.11) and linux-image-next-cubox (version 5.1.16) do not provide any video output at all. I've uploaded the armbianmonitor report from booting the linux-image-dev-cubox kernel. Help on this would be appreciated!