NicoD

We all know there are several shortcomings which causes mess in the config files and prevent simple implementing of more complex scripting. In order to make build system future proof and to cleanup the exception mess, which is virtually everywhere, I decided to start working on a part of the build system. Now the concept works and it is not that far to be mad if idea is bad
 
packages/extras was moved into this, then board support package and (for now) Cubietruck and Tinkerboard hacks from config/sources/ All others have to be implement into packages and their scripts. It's one time job and it will be much easier in the future, with new boards or functions.
 
New board support packages are now broken into unlimited number of packages. Currently there are three main groups and already present logical packages. Most of present are tested and are fully operational. Mostly its copy/past with bug fixed here and there. Perhaps some bugs were made in this process, but in essence system works - for those two boards. Upgrade path is not determined yet - I only focused on packaging and installing. All those packages can be installed from freshly build ones or from the repository. Each package can have their own number and package is rebuild only if number upstream doesn't exists.
 
This RFC includes preliminary merge of @balbes150 TV boxes fork so it's ATM a bit messy. Cubietruck and Tinkerboard images were tested (Bluetooth briefly, audio need to check again), the rest is not prepared and it requires some manual work. I hope someone else, not just the usual suspects, will help doing this.
 
I will slowly move forward and keep it mergeable/synced with upstream.
 
This approach is more or less only a working proposal for changes. IMHO it's better than what we have now but not perfect.

(WIP) Readme with some more details https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/tvboxes/config/packages
 
You can try this by adding LIB_TAG="tvboxes"
 
Edit:
 
Skeleton is done, images can be build from this branch ... Most but not all of our current families and board specialities has been moved under this packaging system. I tested Cubietruck, RockPro, Tinkerboard. At least they works fine - checked for Bluetooth (TB/CB3) and video acceleration on Cubietruck.

TBD: adjust changes in armbian-config regarding desktop (nodm is gone, lightdm only with possible autologin) and kernel switching.

@JMCC Welcome to try adding perhaps Tinkerboard MM script as a new multimedia/something package. What shall be its name? If some 3rd party packages needs to be placed to the repository, put them here: https://github.com/armbian/upload
 
@gprovost mvebu family is not there yet, but if you got time it should be clear what to do? If not, I wrote lousy docs or scripting is more complicated as before  
 
@selfbg Added Olimex SOM204. Check when possible.

@zador.blood.stained Are packages relations alright? I hope they are future proof. Upgrade is planned from armbian-config and is actually optional. Older packages, except boot and kernel are no more.
 
@tkaiser cpufreq is not overwriting anymore, serial consoles are board property SERIALCON="ttyS0,ttyGS0", board config is reloaded right before packages building. Shell we move hardware-optimisations.sh to per board script? Changes should not affect OMV.
 
@Staars Z28Pro merged but untested
 
@lanefu @5kft @TonyMac32 .... check.

@balbes150 have a lot of work to move his scripting into the build engine. Helping him, testing, fixing, ... @all Check and join if you can.
 
beta.armbian.com can be switched to this new world order ASAP.

Expected merge due: 2/2019 ?

Happy 19!

Edit by lanefu 7/2019:

A project #1 has been created on github.   There are several tasks, which will be tracked as issues on the board.

I made a custom Plex Media Player build that leverages the decent performance we get with the fbdev/dri driver.
I tested Rockchip MPP gstreamer plugin.   The Rockchip Hardware VPU is very basic, it breaks with mkv playback, so I decided to use ffmpeg software decoding since it's extremely robust. Also 1080p playback through DRI isn't too shabby!.  If you want 4k video then you need to contact Rockchip.   They seem to be overwhelmed or not interested in bringing 4k support to Linux.   I built a .deb package that will install plexmediaplayer to /usr/local.  No worries about installing to somewhere and clobbering an official library or package.    Official Armbian dependencies will be installed to the proper location.  The plexmedia web-client will be installed to /usr/local/share/plexmediaplayer, the Qt5 binary will be installed to /usr/local/bin/plexmediaplayer
 
install with:
gdebi plex-media-player-install.deb
 
remove with:
apt-get remove plex-media-player-installer
 
To fix the installer package I basically reflashed my NanoPC-T4 with a clean Armbian image,  printed out the errors.
Updated the Debian control file with all the proper dependencies.  
 
Here's the binary install package.  
 
 
 
If you get a dependency error you can use the --ignore-depends dpkg argument and resolve after the install.
The files are installed in an easy location to clean up. 
plex-media-player-install.deb

Igor, I have a plan.
 
I will rework the kmpp module. rebuild ffmpeg and mpv with kmpp support.  I am looking at methods to fix the video playrate issue 
 
Once I have video playback working with hardware accelleration I will upload the binary and source Deb packages.
 
I never even thought the issue was Armbian Support. No.. everyone here is very helpful. It is all Rockchip fault.
I have some Asian friends.
I know they turn beet red after a few drinks and I wouldn't put it past rockchip that the poor vpu support is
Because they are trying to get a large share of and control of  the cheap TV box market.  
Reverse engineering takes longer... Vpu will be working soon
 
Thanks

You can skip board makers from this. They would like to give you full blown Linux supported distro, but they can't deliver that. Rockchip is little more to blame if anyone. They were promising 3399 opensourceness and they are trying but they also can't do this alone. Linux is a community project per se. It's too big task for a few engineers which are working on Linux kernel. Their main focus is providing Android which nobody cares if it is not open source.
 
3399 is actually very well supported if you compare to other chips and it takes time that all boards features works at their maximum performance. Video acceleration is a complex hack and in some/most cases support is done via closed library. Since you are mentioning Nvidia: 
 
 
Without community work, you could only "enjoy" crippled buggy "deploy and forget" images (not a Linux distribution) that come from the board maker's labs and community repackers. FriendlyARM's work support is actually good, one of the best in the industry. They can't support end users - we also can't - except "as is" on forum. If you would send me a technical question an email/PM, you will most likely not get an answer. I stopped doing that, because day has only 24h hours and there is a huge list of people and even bigger list of problems. Most of people mix free software with free work and don't even think that they have to refund for the time wasted ... or risk to receive the same answer as Torvalds gave to Nvidia 
 
Board makers can't provide top shit Linux and don't even try. They would close their company very quickly if they would try to do that. Cost of software support is magnitude higher then making hardware. We at least try improving despite its economically unjustifiable. If this take years, so be it. 

Allwinner case - at the end, this is how things are done - we pay and we done. 3rd party kernel hackers company raising money and putting professionals for certain amount of time on the project to push hardest things forward in truly Opensource way. This is just a help to already vibrant community.  You still need to solve all the dependencies and implement the solution.
 
 

I am not dealing much in this area so I don't know how good or bad the situation is with the RK3399. This is how we done it for older RK's - it's community addition, which is at some point hopefully integrated into Armbian. Even that is hard since we extremely lack people/resources to maintain this project and cope with a 1000+ wishes which are regularly on the list.

Hi NicoD.  
 
Here's the video of the NanoPC-T4 Plex Media Player  1080p   Android 8.0   I want to run Linux, not android.   Also the android image has it's own UI bugs.  
 
Here's the video
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKRn3eLjGa4

I'll try to shoot a video and post it of what the NanoPC-T4 can stream with the FriendlyARM Oreo 8.0 image.    The rat bastards at friendly arm are not releasing the entire source.  Other individuals downloaded the source and attempted to make their custom kernel and image.  FriendlyARM and Rockchip are not publishing all the code.   
I don't want to run android.   I want to get the VPU working because that's how hardware acceleration is important.  I also want to port my SLAM navigation code from my Tinkerboard  based robot to
the NanoPC-T4.     I need OpenCV with full accelaration, also I use VAAPI for video.  I figured I'd take advantage of the battery backed RTC and allow  the robot to sleep while charging and wake at 
at a set time.     The hardware is great,  the published software, no.    I will boot the board up with Android 8.0,  stream a video from my Plex Server at 1080p.  I'll show how it works.
I built plexmediaplayer for Armbian.   I have some hardware MPP support build, rockchip plugins working in Armbian, but MPP is not ready at all. It's buggy, video frames are too fast, audio out of sync by 1 second.
 
The main issue is we don't have proper T860 GPU and VPU support from Rockchip.  Panfrost is far from being "ready"  I downloaded it and tried it.  Also it does not cover VPU support.
 
 
 

Here are some of my SBCs that are under $20 (see photo below).  I have divided them into two categories, with hdmi and not. The ones on the left are without, and on the right are with. The ones without are mostly orangepi's and nanopi's. Just do a search on their web sites and if it is under $20, I have it. One thing to consider is the ones with two spi channels (e.g. nanopi core 1 - note core 2 is better but its over $20), this would allow connecting two spi screens. If you connect two relatively big 3.2 ili9341 screens, with the browser stretched across them, your experience would still suffer but it would be okay in some extreme situations. The ones with hdmi include, raspberrypi zero w (double spi), nanopi A64 (double spi), pcduino4 nano (double spi), nanopi m1 - same as pcduino4 nano (double spi), and the other three orangepi's. Bananapi zero is slightly over $20, I have it connected to a lap dock. Of these, the best is pcduino4 nano (get it on ebay between $5 to $16), supported well in software (armbian), and nanopi a64 ($19.99?) is my second choice, software support is getting there (may be?), at least double spi works with pine64 image (latest kernel). Raspberrypi Zero W is only $5 from my local store, and dual spi screen with camera works, you really can't beat it in price.

I mean, I have 2 RPi 3's collecting dust.  I'm not even mildly interested in trying this image...  Let them sleep...

About time. Thanks for the info. And it's Arm64.
I'll check it out, maybe I can make a video about it.
Cheers

thanks folks - if y'all can help with getting the uart/spi emabled (sounds like its possible), we will do all the documentation so people can use the odroid c2 w/armbian with a wide variety of gpio/spi/uart/i2c devices including parts like DHT sensors, gps, servos, IR, etc. good for home automation, IoT, etc!
that will relieve ya'll from trying to do that kind of support.

I agree with that. As it was initially written someone would think that this is our fault. Which is not the case. NanoPC T4 doesn't have this problem when powered with 12V.

You need a USB voltmeter. They are cheap and easy to find. Something like this. Just put it into a usb port, and it will show the voltage. If it's 5V while the cpu is maxed out, and maybe a 1A load on the USB, then you're ok, if it's a lot less. Then it's no good for powering a hard drive.

Right, 3.5 ones have their owned power supplies. They are 8TB MyBook. 2.5 one is powered via USB. It is a Tohisba one.

ooo, It's alive  Will add images ASAP.

What I found by digging Ayufan build script and comparing Rockchip Wiki, is that Ayufan doesn't place the u-boot-itb at sector 0x4000, but at sector 0x200, probably to avoid waste of space ...
I'm about to do final commit in Armbian script, you will then have to simply do a build of the image.
 
My commit will use "flow #2", but maybe the glitch in "flow #1" is maybe related to sector location too ...
 
EDIT : Here is the commit https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/c3e46a5d863ebc4d00d666b3a19eed00e3d0c17d
 
EDIT2 : I've tested the "nand-sata-install" on eMMC, and it is working fine too ...

I think I got it working ... But doing it manually, not within Armbian build scripts ...
I will check if I can integrate that into them ...

Both the API and our driver were merged in time for...  more over at: 
https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-support-in-mainline-linux-november-status-update/
 

Seems like the community is seriously demanding 64 bit versions of the RK media script (3399 and 3328). Give me some days, I'll work on it.

@chwe I've read your post before souper , I didn't read the whole story ...
During souper, watching TV, the same subject comes there in the news ...
In summary from Canadian's news, this chinese scientist is braking ethic rules a lot, the reportage says that if he would do what it did in Canada, he could ended-up with 10 years of prison.
I hope those "newly baken childs" won't become "monsters" since "crisp" isn't safe at all !

or frozen for cryonics... Well, we may should care sometimes a bit more.. We got this nice little ball with a thin little film of atmosphere for a limited time - means basically we rented it.. Normally you should give back rented stuff in a good shape and don't fuck it up. Not sure if humans are trusted renters... (yep there's a bit of sarcasm in it)
 
It's clear, only the experiment can tell us if those researchers assumptions work. Question is, are those assumptions worth to start such an experiment? Experiments were partly made on animals, for me it was obvious that the 'ultimate goal' will then be to  go to humans as well. Do I think it's a god idea? I assume I didn't thought long enough about it but I tend to say no at all. Genetics is a lottery.. you get it partly from your mother, partly from your father, the whole cocktail is mixed up and then you've to deal with what you got. With such a modification there's a third party involved which might be right or completely wrong with his or her assumptions what should be beneficial for you. There are genetic combinations which don't fit 'well'. E.g. couples with enhanced chances that their kids won't be healthy. Is it fair? I don't think so. Should we try to 'fix' it? I don't think so either... Well, it's easy to say that as long as you're not affected (or at least not knowingly affected) by such a 'mismatch'.
But 'playing' with life before it was even born just sounds wrong to me.
Even a baby can partly express itself if it agrees on certain actions you take as parents. A cell can't - it dies if you messed the cell up too much but otherwise there's no way for the cell to say no to your modification. Okay, there are a few 'repair mechanisms' but I would assume that such a big modification can't be 'reverted' by the cells.
 
[this part is 'a bit' speculative]
At the moment there's only the statement from the researcher claiming what he did, but as far as I followed the news, there's no proof that he actually did it. With proof I mean independent check of his research. It could also be a 'bad joke' - means he just claims he did it. It might need some time until the situation is more clear. In case they did it, I hope the Chinese government may overthink their stand point on genetics. Their laws allows much more than western countries accept but even there, such an experiment was never approved and I assume if the researcher would apply for such an experiment it would be rejected. But their 'more open' standpoint on genetic modification ended in an atmosphere where someone thought he could try it. Maybe they should make it more clear where the "red line" is so that such experiments don't happen again...
 

You can see it positive, but also negative. For example...
First these twins are human lab rats. We don't know enough of the process to ensure their health. Taking away that gen (that prevents HIV from attacking the system) makes them voulnerable to other diseases. We know this from many people who don't have this gen. But those people got so on a natural way.
Second. Is this something what will devide the world a lot more? People who can affort it will modify their baby's in their benefit. This will make them "better" than "normal" people, and they may believe that too. We all know what happens when people think they are better than others.
Third. Should we even do this? Don't we first need to find out what the effect will be on the long term. These changes will also be present in their children. They have children with others also with modified dna. We don't know how these will mix. What will become of them? Will they still be human?
What with the mistakes the gen programmers will make? We all know programmers or far from perfect.

Just a thought.
It's one person making the choice for the world to do this. Now the genie is out of the bottle. The debate has gotten useless.
I don't care much, too old to be able to profit from it(I'm born since a while). And by the time there could be problems because of it I'll be sleeping under the ground.
Cheers.

Well I linked the top product, but you can find all other (cheaper) variants of it.

@Igor
 
I decided to go back to the question of integrating the build options for TV boxes into the overall git. Alternatively, at the first stage, you can make an additional branch (for example, "tv-box") and put all the code from my git "Build-Armbian/master" into it (with minimal fixes author, etc.). I am ready to support a set of basic images (which I am currently releasing) for a number of models that I have in stock (Khadas VIM\VIM2\EDGE , MVR9 etc).
 
If there are other options - I am ready to discuss them.

Update: I switched kernels from armbian-configi after reading at some forums and aplay -l gave the device list. Started i3 and opened chrome, tested a youtube video and it was working automatically. 

To start the system enough to download, unzip, burn the image to the SD card. Connect the SD card to the EDGE and turn the power on.
The system starts automatically. Details on the initial setup of the running system can be found in these topics.
 
https://yadi.sk/d/ie_dx5x_w2xUIQ
 
https://mega.nz/#F!n1hihSKT!8kYublAPG4RtwSIBihOkVg