Jump to content

No HDMI with linux-image-dev-cubox (Kernel 5.2.11)

v-man

By v-man
in Other families

 Share

Recommended Posts

v-man

v-man

Posted
Posted
Armbianmonitor:
http://ix.io/1UBx

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!

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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

 

Igor

Igor

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, v-man said:

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!


Sadly, AFAIK there are no other/many maintainers for this platform. I spent weeks to get my self up to date (which is difficult once you stop paying attention to development) and then fix thins to produce this semi usable 5.2.y kernel images. I know I should invest more time, but I simply can't afford.

 

4.14.y should be in a better shape ATM. Its stock + small fixes and enhancement.

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Quote

Sadly, AFAIK there are no other/many maintainers for this platform.

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.

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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:

Quote

  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 145, in apport_excepthook
    os.O_WRONLY | os.O_CREAT | os.O_EXCL, 0o640), 'wb') as f:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/crash/_usr_lib_cnf-update-db.0.crash'

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/cnf-update-db", line 26, in <module>
    col.create(db)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/CommandNotFound/db/creator.py", line 93, in create
    self._fill_commands(con)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/CommandNotFound/db/creator.py", line 127, in _fill_commands
    self._parse_single_commands_file(con, fp)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/CommandNotFound/db/creator.py", line 165, in _parse_single_commands_file
    suite=tagf.section["suite"]
KeyError: 'suite'

 

Igor

Igor

Posted
Posted
39 minutes ago, v-man said:

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 don't know what you expect from that upgrade? Errors are kernel related and kernel will not be changed since Ubuntu does not provide it. Upstream user space upgrade scripts are outside our control. They can work or not. 

 

41 minutes ago, v-man said:

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


It's known bug but can't help in this area, not very familiar with imx6 and graphics drivers. I was looking for a solution some time ago, but ... not found, don't remember to what is this related to. Try around, if Librelec folks have done some progress with imx6 ... Perhaps its just a wrong kernel config. Or some parameter is needed ...

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Quote

I don't know what you expect from that upgrade?

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.

Igor

Igor

Posted
Posted
45 minutes ago, v-man said:

But the Debian wiki says about the CuBox


Pointless. Check edit history: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/SolidRun/CuBox-i?action=info

 

45 minutes ago, v-man said:

Apparently it supports

 

That's more theoretical / IMO copy paste from here https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/arch/arm/boot/dts/Makefile?h=v4.19.73 but its worth trying because I suspect kernel config issue.


If all this would be this simple, we would provide a full working image long time ago :rolleyes:

 

Check if there is any Libre/Openelec work (in any state) around modern kernel.

 

P.S.

Kodi / acceleration was operational at some point with modern kernel (4.14 or 4.19) ... but later it broke.

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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...

Igor

Igor

Posted
Posted
31 minutes ago, v-man said:

I could not figure out what point you were making


Information is too old and realted to testings with mainline kernel back in 2017. More info is for Wandboard which is the same in this: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Wandboard#cma It indicates features are developed, but I guess poorly maintained.

 

31 minutes ago, v-man said:

Do you think it's worth writing a short bug report to that mailing list? I can't find a bug tracker...


If it was already reported, then IMO no point to replicate. Nobody likes duplicate bug reports.

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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.

usual user

usual user

Posted
Posted
Quote
10 hours ago, v-man said:

under Weston... only Kodi worked, and only with 720p material the CPU usage was not 100%

You wrote that Kodi does not perform  for you under Weston. Out of curiosity, with the kodi-gbm package installed, how does Kodi perform launched by a text  console user in a virtual terminal. The user should be a member of the video, audio and input group.

 

v-man

v-man

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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.

usual user

usual user

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, v-man said:

I had some sort of crash trying to start from a text console.

As Weston introduces some unnecessary indirection, using kms/drm with proper zero copy video pipeline maybe provide better performance. This is working for me like outlined in my first post. Only heavy scaling could be a problem as the support for hardware scaling has just landed in 5.4. I don`t know if ffmpeg has support for it (so Kodi can profit), gstreamer1 can use it already.
You unfortunately did not gave enough information to help you any further.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines

  I accept