Reputation from Ben N Voutour - Page 3 - Armbian Community Forums

Ben N Voutour reacted to chinhhut in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 30, 2021

I have a T9 box (2G memory & 16GB flash) and just install Armbian 21.11 - Debian Bullseye minimal - mainline kernel 5.14.14 successfully to eMMC according to the guide.
Everything seems to work well until I tried to unplug the adapter and then replug the adapter again. After that, the box unable to start even I tried to unplug/replug the adapter several times again. There is only black screen via HDMI output.
Of course, I can install Armbian to the eMMC from scratch again but I'm afraid the "black screen" error above will happen.
@jockdo you have any suggestions to fix this? Please let me know if you need any detail steps or log to debug.
Thank you very much for your great work again.

Ben N Voutour reacted to chinhhut in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 30, 2021

I did not run the rk3318-config yesterday, just keep default. But I run the "apt get upgrade" and also forgot to run the following command after installing to eMMC:
Run apt-mark hold linux-image-edge-rockchip64 linux-dtb-edge-rockchip64 to avoid the upgrade of kernel with the armbian official one, since it still does not contain rk3318 That would be the reason the kernel of my box was updated to the latest one from armbian official. It did not contain 3318 dtb so the box was unable to boot.

Today, I just re-install from scratch again then run the hold command to prevent to upgrade the kernel. The "black screen" error is not happened again up to now even unplug/plug about 3 times.

Thank you very much for your quick response.

Ben N Voutour reacted to jock in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 30, 2021

ook thanks for reporting! Much better to know that it wasn't a dtb/kernel fault

Ben N Voutour reacted to MX10.AC2N in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

Hi all, So I started from scratch, everything works fine without any overlays but this morning I tried adding overlays=rk3318-box-led-conf3 in armbianEnv.txt and the box freezes at startup

Ben N Voutour reacted to Gausus in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

EDIT:

Try forcing mode on HDMI
Add new line inn armbianEnv.txt

sudo nano /boot/armbianEnv.txt
extraargs=video=HDMI-A-1:D drm.edid_firmware=edid/1920x1080.bin

# OR you can test this setting
extraargs=video=HDMI-A-1:D drm.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/1920x1080.bin video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080

# IF not working test lower res like 1024x768

# Y can set different refresh rate to : 1024x768@30
extraargs=video=HDMI-A-1:D drm.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/1024x768.bin video=HDMI-A-1:1024x768@30

If working change res after login from Settings > Display ( Xfce)

More info her LINK1 : LINK2

Ben N Voutour reacted to jock in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

Very strange...
May I ask you if you're using the sdcard or the system is installed on emmc?
Also if you can edit armbianEnv.txt and set verbosity=10 maybe the kernel provides some more hints.

At the moment I'm running out of ideas: a full dmesg from serial would give some hints on what is going on
I need some time to think about the issue...

Ben N Voutour reacted to MX10.AC2N in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

At moment, I have system just on sd-card..
I switched to verbosity = 10 but then it scrolls too fast on the screen, suddenly I tried to film it and bring out some photos but hey it's not super easy ..
It gives a lot of image very blurry finally I did the best, at the end I only have 5 lines with the rest of the black screen .. Hope that can help you ..

Ben N Voutour reacted to MX10.AC2N in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

copy of dmesg without rk3318-box-cpu-hs and rk3318-box-led-conf3 => https://paste.yunohost.org/ogasoqumeq.vbs

Ben N Voutour reacted to jock in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

@MX10.AC2N
What is a sec... there is something that definitely should not be there. In your dmesg log I see:
[ 2.326648] rk3328-dmc ff780000.dmc: current ATF version 0x101
Instead the expected message from a freshly installed system (debian bullseye) is this:
[ 2.307538] rk3328-dmc ff780000.dmc: trusted firmware need to update or is invalid
On you system the DRAM memory controller (DMC) driver is definitely active, while it should not be! This is incredibly unexpected!
Now I tried both the latest images on my box and the DMC does not activate because there is the need for a bootloader piece of code I didn't yet plugged into, so I wonder what the hell is going on!

Do you ever installed the older image with legacy kernel in eMMC or is there original Android in eMMC?
This is absolutely strange, it looks like the bootloader is not what it is expected to be!

By the way to fix this issue, which is potentially causing you a system freeze or kernel fault, substitute /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3318-box.dtb with the one attached here.

rk3318-box.dtb

Ben N Voutour reacted to MX10.AC2N in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

Thank again @jock
So on the emmc I still have the armbian bulleyes system from the station-m1 image
So I replaced the rk3318-box.dtb file (yours is slightly heavier 63761 bytes against 62913 for the dtb already present in the image) here is the new dmesg => https://paste.yunohost.org/alatoyakud.md

Ben N Voutour reacted to jock in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

Ahhh ok, we got the right explanation.
Now the message is properly gone from dmesg.

The problem is this: the box always boots from eMMC because there is a valid bootloader there. The bootloader is in reality composed of many parts executed one after another.
The station-m1 bootloader contains a thing that is called ATF (Arm Trusted Firmware). This piece of software is like a protected sandbox, something that runs outside the kernel or, if you prefer, above the kernel. It can whatever do it wants, can even stop the linux kernel. In fact it controls some very low level things, like system reset, core initialization, standby/resume, and so on...

It also controls the RAM frequency scaling, so memory can switch from 300 Mhz up to 800 Mhz and more.

Now there are two "flavours": the proprietary rockchip ATF (compiled by rockchip with their own customizations) and the public one provided by ARM.
The proprietary ATF is fully-fledged, but actually we don't really know what is inside: it's a blob provided by rockchip.
The public opensource ATF has just basic features, but we know it is harmless.

When I say harmless I want to stress out the fact that the ATF can peek his nose everywhere in the system, in fact it is widely used to implement DRM (Digital Rights Management) and HDCP (HDMI Copy Protection) features in tv boxes, to prevent piracy and restrict user rights in some form.

A proof of some harmful behaviour (not yet fully understood) is the fact that if I run rk3318 boards with proprietary ATF, the system crashes when cpu frequency is > 1.1Ghz. 1.1Ghz is the advertised speed for the rk3318 chip.
When I run the opensource ATF, rk3318 boards runs happy at 1.3 Ghz or even above.

Now this behaviour is a bit suspect: I don't want to state that the rockchip ATF is crashing the system on purpose to limit the frequency speed of the chip, but if we consider the final effect, it is so.

All this long explanation is to say that maybe the bootloader installed in the eMMC may cause headaches of some sort. I don't know if there are limiting behaviours on rk3328 too, but as we are used to say in Italy, the wolf loses the hair but does not lose the vice (ie: what they do once, they can do again)

It would be wise to clean the eMMC bootloader. If you're not afraid to lose the eMMC installation, you could erase the eMMC with blkdiscard.
If you don't want to lose it, you may make a backup of the first megabyte of the eMMC on the sdcard, zero-fill the first megabyte of the eMMC, and finally reboot.
Otherwise leave it as-is and just and see what happens with led-conf3 overlay again.

Ben N Voutour reacted to MX10.AC2N in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

Hi @jock and thank you for these explanations it enlightens my knowledge a little more, suddenly I left the emmc as it is and tried adding overlays, it works I was able to put led-conf3 and cpu-hs without problem here is the copy of dmesg => https://paste.yunohost.org/ewutojutal.md

However I come back to your explanations, you indicate that ATF would be useful for DRM rights, suddenly this attracts my interest because I am looking for a solution to be able to read the amazon prime videos and unfortunately I still have this damn message missing drm rights .. do you know a parade with this problem? I looked a lot on Github, I even tried a few installs but nothing convincing, often the problem is that we are under arm64 (no drm rights under arm64) because with armhf apparently there will be solutions .. Y -will there be a way to build a multiarch arm64 / armhf image or maybe just an armhf image ..? For the moment I am in the idea of using a docker like https://github.com/HenningThiemann/docker-chromium-armhf ..

Thanks again, apparently the problems seem to be solved, I will go back to 1.3GHz.

Ben N Voutour reacted to Tarzanus in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 28, 2021

I tried downloading and running the latest image from SD card. I get kernel panic at boot. Anyone knows how to start it successfully? It's Rockchip based box A95X Z2.

Ben N Voutour reacted to jock in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 25, 2021

Glad to hear everything is back to normal.
About the Amazon DRM etc... I don't know anything about. I see that libreelec is downloading chrome and extracting the widewine DRM binary to let some plugins work, but I did not ever try Amazon Prime and don't know what are the requirements for that.
The proprietary ATF may provide a "secure" application of some sort for DRM, but this is a guess. I never digged into what in reality there is. I may guess that "secure" ATF software is tailored with some other userland software which I'm not aware of that may lie in the Android image, but this is all purely guessing

Ben N Voutour reacted to curse in CSC Armbian for RK3318/RK3328 TV box boards October 22, 2021

While I was in Sweden some month ago, I only had access to an old 1024x768 monitor, connected via an HDMI to DVI adapter. It did NOT work. Multitool, yes, everything else, no.
I would not recommend to do an apt update && apt upgrade before you have gone through "armbian-config" and frozen firmware and kernel updates, or frozen them by other means.