stut

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/6316-uart-over-sd-port/

Is it possible to build a 3.x image with the current build-armbian repo? I picked legacy kernel but ended up with 4.x which won't boot, 5.x also won't boot. I tried soldering on a serial connector but it didn't work so I have no idea why 4/5 fail to boot. Any help would be appreciated. I read somewhere you can access the serial interface via the sd card slot? Would love to get 4/5 kernels to work but since I can't get that to work compiling a full 3.x image would suffice.

I’ve never gotten a kernel update on tv box builds. I don’t think balbes150 pushes new tv box kernels to the Arminian repo and also doesn’t run a repo himself. Userland packages were always upgradable.

I was being rhetorical Hope they follow Ubuntu at Debian. Even though I know about this every time I get that wrong password prompt I'm like huh?

Sorry, it was buster yes. Not sure since when it’s been like this. Only happens with certain APs. I think they don’t like the client mac charging after a probe or something. Happened on an OpenWrt router and an Apple Airport router. Running standard firmware, nothing exotic or anything. There’s some other report about network-monitor doing this that messes up connecting to APs. He argues it may mess up the card not the AP. But I would like to argue that is not wanted behaviour under any circumstance unless you connect to a public wifi. Network-manager connects with a different mac address every time. It will also mess any mac filtering you may have setup or you may get. new ip every single time you reboot/reconnect. Apparently this function has been added somewhere in 2017 and from time time pops back up. Guess Ubuntu has this disabled and Debian enabled?

I was having issues connecting to certain APs, the password was always wrong even though I knew for sure they were right. In the end it was due to network-manager's random mac address trickery. After disabling it I could connect just fine. Maybe the random mac should be turned off by default as it can interfere with certain APs? A quick fix, create /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/99-disable-wifi-random-mac.conf and add the following; [connection] wifi.mac-address-randomization=1 [device] wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no

Thank you! I'm glad to see them return. Was missing those kernel and kernel header .deb files.

I setup a lot of Piholes in lxc containers running Debian and the installer is always messing up something with the dependancies. Usually requires some manual package installation. This is both due to the minimal nature of the initial lxc rootfs but the installer has been buggy for al one long time. Downloading the installer bash file and running it like bash -x install.sh usually reveals where and what goes wrong.

Agreed. Benchmarks are an indication at best. Software and good drivers and very important too. I've gotten some cheap S905 boxes and they vary a lot in actual speed despite them all having same amount of ram and storage. If your cheap box has crappy nand/emmc there's not much you can if it also doesn't have usb 3. Even worse if it has slow ram. Sometimes things get better in updates, but if you run Android you're depended on updates from the seller with these tv boxes. Not many sell actual brands like Tanix. The sell whatever is cheap, rebadge it and sell it. I managed to get a clean Android TV to work on one of these S905 boxes and it helped a lot but the slow onboard storage is holding it back a lot. What do you plan on running on it? Android or Linux?

The Tanix box I linked has the H6 which should be plenty. I couldn't find many benchmarks between S905X3 and H6 but the ones I found are pretty much on par. Differences could be explained by cpu frequency, ram, speed of the disk it runs on and the OS it runs on. Personally I would lean towards H6 but thats because my NanoPi's all have Allwinner chips too and they're very reliable for me. Allwinner has pretty decent Linux support as well. For me that weights heavier than anything else, but for multimedia they should both be fine. Pretty much all codecs one would need are supported by the chipsets.

Yes, sorry that is what I meant. But def. don't go for Raspberry Pi. It's not worth the money and they cut annoying corners in the h/w design. LE are the Kodi distro's LibreElec. The latter focuses solely on tv boxes. both just run Kodi and not much more though you can install a Docker add-on or stuff like that. In your scenario a tv box might be best suited, it's how I started but it left me wanting more. Like better Linux support so I ended up buying sbc (single board computers). I like what FriendlyElec has to offer. They have a board to match any budget. For example I use one of their cheapest board for OpenWrt and the more expensive/faster ones for NAS and some light desktop usage. As for which tv box you should buy for your $50 I would try and find something thats a real brand with their own website and some decent update support. Many of the really tv boxes won't get updated much and you'll end up having an out of date Android running on there. Unless you of course replace the OS (if its supported). Get something with at least 2-4gb ram and 5ghz wifi and a nice 4-8 core cpu in there. If you want go full budget and don't mind tinkering with it yourself you can gram something cheap but it probably won't be fast enough for frustration free Kodi. Opening it up to solder/connect a serial/uart interface is almost always a good idea unless you get a tv box thats well supported by Armbian already. I don't use tv boxes as tv box so I'm not in the know of which of the newer and faster tv boxes are supported. something with a support Rockchip should be a safe bet though. I hope others here will have some good suggestions as which specific box gives the most bang for your budget. I'm interested in seeing those suggestions as well. As a brand suggestion look into Tanix. They had some decent boxes with good updates and support but not sure what they have now. I'm out of the loop Edit: Looked at Tanix and found this box. Looks good to me, but I'm biased towards the brand. It is about $50 though (50 euro on Amazon for 64gb storage version). Dunno about Armbian support, it has H6 so should be possible to run it. Plenty of ram and speed methinks.

Have you considered an sbc? There's plenty with hdmi output and decent enough graphics to h/w encode most videos, specially when running something like LE. The upside of a tv box is that you got it all in a small box ready to go but it's not always worth it and greatly depends on what you will be running on it. If you need good Linux support I would go the sbc route.

If you need to free up space try installing localepurge to remove unwanted languages from docs and man pages and such. When every megabyte counts this will help a lot without having to remove any programs. Select no when asked about the exclude path option to process already installed stuff. If you select yes it will only strip the languages from newly installed stuff.

I do have one of those gun like ones, thanks for reminding me. I checked some temps and the reported temps are pretty much spot on. It might run cooler without the 1.3ghz overlay cuz I think that increases the voltage, not sure though. Of course I can't measure the chip itself due to the heatsink but I did my best to get a close as possible and find the hottest parts. I do have a temp sensor for a multimeter somewhere that is probably small enough to sit between the heatsink and the dye of the chip but it will reduce the surface so might influence results a bit. Edit: ran sbc-bench without errors: http://ix.io/28pz

RC1 working very nicely on NanoPi NEO2 boards here. Also running cooler than I remember, hovering between 22-27c idle/light load. Everything I need works including 8811au ac sticks and overlays to enable 1.3ghz and extra usb port on the oled add-on, the oled also works. Wifi seems faster/more responsive. No issues to report so far. Great work!

There is only 1 p212 dtb file available. Cpufrequtils is configured ok and cpufrequtils doesn't decide with frequencies are available. I linked a full uart boot log and output of /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies in my previous post. The right frequencies are missing so cpufrequtil config doesn't matter. It runs around 5-10c higher than on CE or stock Android, I had hoped getting the right scaling steps could help there. Thanks for your answer.

This installed to internal without panics, running smoothly but still cpu speed is wrong for me on p212. Only 1000mhz max instead of 1200mhz.

Very nice guide, thanks for this! What I'm missing is an upgrade part. How does one upgrade to a newer release without losing data? I remember a while back we could download separate deb files for the new release and install those one by one. But I don't see those anymore, just an image now. Is the best way to upgrade to do a clean install and then copy back the old files and stuff? Almost seems more feasible to build your own from source so you end up with the deb packages to upgrade an existing system. But Maybe I'm missing something.

Thanks for the awesome work merging all the boxes into one build. I tried the 19.11.5 build on my p212 box, pretty much everything works out of the box including wifi but the cpu only switches between 500 and 1000mhz when it should have more steps up to 1200mhz. I put a UART/bootlog for 19.11.5 here. How can I fix the cpu to have the right frequency and frequency steps for cpufreqd? root@arm:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies 100000 250000 500000 667000 1000000 Installing to internal works on previous non-unified 19.11.3 but on this build it causes a kernel panic while it's copying files: [ 108.969561] SError Interrupt on CPU2, code 0xbf000000 -- SError [ 108.969566] CPU: 2 PID: 1642 Comm: tar Tainted: G C 5.5.0-rc7-arm-64 #19.11.5 [ 108.969569] Hardware name: Amlogic Meson GXL (S905X) P212 Development Board (DT) [ 108.969571] pstate: 20000005 (nzCv daif -PAN -UAO) [ 108.969573] pc : __arch_copy_from_user+0x1bc/0x240 [ 108.969574] lr : copyin+0x94/0xa8 [ 108.969576] sp : ffff8000136d3c10 [ 108.969577] x29: ffff8000136d3c10 x28: ffff000059011828 [ 108.969581] x27: 00000000000100a1 x26: fffffdfffff4c000 [ 108.969586] x25: 0000000000000000 x24: ffff8000136d3d40 [ 108.969589] x23: 0000000000001000 x22: 0000000000001000 [ 108.969593] x21: 0000000000001000 x20: ffff8000136d3d50 [ 108.969597] x19: ffff000005300000 x18: 0000000000000000 [ 108.969601] x17: 0000000000000000 x16: 0000000000000000 [ 108.969605] x15: 0000000000000000 x14: 20202020200a276e [ 108.969608] x13: 5c656854202e7374 x12: 6e656d7567726120 [ 108.969612] x11: 73746920666f206d x10: 7573206568742073 [ 108.969616] x9 : 646c65697920726f x8 : 73746e656d756772 [ 108.969620] x7 : 6127202020202020 x6 : ffff0000053000d0 [ 108.969624] x5 : ffff000005301000 x4 : 0000000000000000 [ 108.969627] x3 : 0000aaaaddf5a000 x2 : 0000000000000ec0 [ 108.969631] x1 : 0000aaaaddf5a110 x0 : ffff000005300000 [ 108.969636] Kernel panic - not syncing: Asynchronous SError Interrupt [ 108.969638] CPU: 2 PID: 1642 Comm: tar Tainted: G C 5.5.0-rc7-arm-64 #19.11.5 [ 108.969641] Hardware name: Amlogic Meson GXL (S905X) P212 Development Board (DT) [ 108.969642] Call trace: [ 108.969644] dump_backtrace+0x0/0x1d0 [ 108.969645] show_stack+0x14/0x20 [ 108.969647] dump_stack+0xbc/0x100 [ 108.969648] panic+0x160/0x320 [ 108.969650] nmi_panic+0x60/0x90 [ 108.969651] arm64_serror_panic+0x74/0x80 [ 108.969653] do_serror+0x80/0x138 [ 108.969654] el1_error+0x8c/0x108 [ 108.969656] __arch_copy_from_user+0x1bc/0x240 [ 108.969658] copy_page_from_iter+0xdc/0x260 [ 108.969659] pipe_write+0x12c/0x480 [ 108.969661] new_sync_write+0x16c/0x180 [ 108.969663] __vfs_write+0x2c/0x40 [ 108.969664] vfs_write+0xb0/0x1d0 [ 108.969666] ksys_write+0xd0/0xe8 [ 108.969667] __arm64_sys_write+0x18/0x20 [ 108.969669] el0_svc_handler+0xac/0x218 [ 108.969671] el0_sync_handler+0x18c/0x490 [ 108.969672] el0_sync+0x140/0x180 [ 108.969692] SMP: stopping secondary CPUs [ 108.969693] Kernel Offset: disabled [ 108.969695] CPU features: 0x00002,20002000 [ 108.969697] Memory Limit: none If any more logs or debugging is needed let me know, happy to provide whatever I can.