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Armbian for Amlogic S912


chocho

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Ok so, you made me realize that it is actually possible to brick a box only by messing with disk formatting.

 

I first though that, as with a regular computer, only firmware upgrade can brick the mother board. I'll be taking a look at proper firmware flash on freaktab. But from what I have seen one should not expect a high success rate from this method.

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On 10/12/2018 at 3:45 PM, gnthibault said:

Ok so, you made me realize that it is actually possible to brick a box only by messing with disk formatting.

 

I first though that, as with a regular computer, only firmware upgrade can brick the mother board. I'll be taking a look at proper firmware flash on freaktab. But from what I have seen one should not expect a high success rate from this method.

 

Good news, I bought a USB A male to USB A male on a Win10 64bits, and I was able to unbrick my H96pro+ box, following a tutorial like this one:

 

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USB keybaord is not recognized by H96 PRO+ 3G/32G with Armbian_5.64_Aml-s9xxx_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.19.0-rc7_desktop_20181019.img. I used gxm_q200.dtb as dtb.img. Any help or idea? My idea was to move it to EMMC, if everything works.

 

Edit 1: Further i edited uenv.ini and elinux.conf to point to correct dtb in dtb folder. Post that was able to set username and password, but post that it is a blank screen with blinking cursor.

 

Edit 2: Armbian_5.60_Aml-s9xxx_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.18.7_desktop_20180928.img worked for me

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

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Is there any image with Kodi that works (with accelerated HW) ?  I tried Armbian_5.67_Aml-s9xxx_Debian_stretch_default_4.19.0-rc7_desktop_20181117.img.xz .  Then installed kodi through apt-get install kodi.  It installed properly but when I tried to run it it gave me : DRI2 canno9t authenticate and no window appear. Everything else works fine.  (X seems to not be accelerated).  I tried also old one aml-kodi-debian_5.41_arm64.deb and install kodi and aml-codec from deb packages.  Installed properly but when I run it (after fixing libEGL symbolic link) X background appear 4 times on screen, (everything is multiplicated 4 times) and only reboot fix it. I installed librelec and there kodi works fine, but I need to install other things beside kodi...

 

I have Beeklink GT1 Ultimate (S912) with 3G (not sure if they are real or fake).

 

Thank You

 

Edited by spon901
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Hello, I need some help please.
Every time I made a apt upgrade I have this error message :

E: Write error - ~LZMAFILE (28: No space left on device)

Any advice to solve this. Thanks

Envoyé de mon ONEPLUS A6003 en utilisant Tapatalk

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Hi all, firstly a big thank you for everyones hard work on this! It's awesome :)

 

I have a weird problem with my S912 based box with gigabit ethernet, all appears ok and indeed will be for days at a time IF the NIC never really gets used much. As soon as I start shoving traffic down it eventually it kinda starts stalling, stops responding then eventually pretty much dies altogether.

 

I'm not sure if it's significant but if I load up the NIC in both directions simultaneously with iPerf3 I got about 900Mbit down and about 80Mbit up but if I just transmit I get 900+Mbit and if I just receive I get 900+Mbit. I'd of thought I would of got a more balanced result here when testing simultaneously in both directions? 

 

As an example of when the NIC starts dying during a recent ping test to it it dropped 188 packets then responded with some pretty incredible latency then stopped again as you can see here: http://pasted.co/0bd5d8aa

 

Any ideas anyone?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

UPDATE 1: Oddly I've noticed I start a ping from the S912 box the response times are slow but WAY faster then if i start a ping from the box it's pinging (so one way round is 100x faster round trip wise)...  plus it also seems if i start a ping from the S912 box i then get a response from the other clients ping requests otherwise it doesn't respond. For reference it's using RTL8211F chipset if it matters.

 

UPDATE 2: If i down the interface and bring it back up on the box with an ifconfig eth0 down && ifconfig eth0 up it brings it back to life and it starts operating normally again.

 

UPDATE 3: I believe the problem has been fixed using this patch - https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10712159/ massive thanks to ccaione on #linux-amlogic on IRC for his help on this! :thumbup:

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¿Has someone been able to have mali drivers for the T820? 

 

I'm trying to get them using mali-midgard-dkms package but it requires linux headers and i can't find the linux-header-4.19.6-aml-s9xxx package anywhere nor the linux-image-4.19.6-aml-s9xxx to build them myself.

 

I would like to use the hardware acceleration that S912 has :(

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Hello

I tried to run from usb 3 stick Armbian_5.67_Aml-s9xxx_Debian_stretch_default_4.19.6_desktop_20181207 on ugoos am3

and 

Armbian_5.62_Aml-s9xxx_Ubuntu_xenial_default_4.19.0-rc7_desktop_20181018.img

 

in both cases I had problem at bootup and never got in gui screen.

 

All usb devices works in native android 7.12

 

How to run linux on ugoos am3?

 

Screens here https://my-files.ru/0fjgqd

 

Thank you in advance.

 

 

 

 

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Is there any chance someone could get bCNC running on any of these builds? I'm currently running it on a rpi3b+ but would love to run it on my R-Box Pro S-10. It should be able to run so much quicker on it than any pi does.

(UPDATE) Got it running after I installed a ton of packages. Can only execute it with the terminal though. Still a big step forward anyhow.

Edited by Shuttered
Solved my problem
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Hi I installed Armbian  5.75 debian stretch 4.20.5 for s912 on my abox a3, all went fine and now boots perfect to command line just as required.

I have trouble though.

I compile program by unpacking a .tar file

unpacked the ,tar has 3 components which include the executable

I set permissions and make it excecutable with

sudo chmod +x myprogam

When I try to run it...

 

./myprogram

This is the result

cannot execute binary file: Exec format error

Thank you for this project.

 

root@aml:~# uname -a
Linux aml 4.20.5-aml-s912 #5.75 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 12 08:29:46 MSK 2019 aarch64 GNU/Linux

 

Edited by biker
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Mecool Km8-P

 

I am testing Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_20190211.img.xz with meson-gxm-q201.dtb on Mecool Km8-P S912 1G/8G, booting from an SD card right now but I intend to flash Armbian on the eMMC later.

USB works. Ethernet works. Not tested HDMI output (using TV box as headless server).

 

Previously was using same TV box with Armbian 5.44 with 3.14.29 and that worked fine too.

 

As usual many many thanks to Oleg (balbes150) who has done an amazing good work on the Linux kernel and creating those images. :thumbup:

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6 hours ago, AndrewDB said:

Mecool Km8-P S912 1G/8G, booting from an SD card right now but I intend to flash Armbian on the eMMC later.

I could not get the flash memory on my Mecool to stop some how over writing itself with the internal Android image.

 

I used the Armbian utility to write the armbian image to the 8gb flash.

 

 

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31 minutes ago, Seasalt said:

I could not get the flash memory on my Mecool to stop some how over writing itself with the internal Android image.

 

I used the Armbian utility to write the armbian image to the 8gb flash.

 

 

Seasalt, I am not sure what you mean by overwriting itself, could you please provide some more details? :huh:

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On 2/21/2019 at 6:46 AM, AndrewDB said:

Seasalt, I am not sure what you mean by overwriting itself, could you please provide some more details? :huh:

I tried to get the Armbian s912 image to write to the KM8p Mecool 1gb/8gb flash memory.

 

I used the utility i found in Armbian settings.

 

It is a control line interface app.

 

It gave me an option to write the image to Flash memory.

 

After writing the image, I could then look at the 8GB FLASH  using GPARTED and see that the flash memory was now partitioned differently.

 

Now I have 3 KM8 Mecool's and they were all bought separately. They seem to have different Android images on the flash memory.

 

To cut a long story it appears that on rebooting the KM8 i had written the Armbian image to flash on, it would reboot and go back or reinstall android and then boot.

 

In the end i gave up on installing Armbian to the flash  and just installed the same Android 7 image on all three km8's.

 

 

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15 hours ago, Seasalt said:

I tried to get the Armbian s912 image to write to the KM8p Mecool 1gb/8gb flash memory.

 

I used the utility i found in Armbian settings.

 

It is a control line interface app.

 

It gave me an option to write the image to Flash memory.

 

After writing the image, I could then look at the 8GB FLASH  using GPARTED and see that the flash memory was now partitioned differently.

 

Now I have 3 KM8 Mecool's and they were all bought separately. They seem to have different Android images on the flash memory.

 

To cut a long story it appears that on rebooting the KM8 i had written the Armbian image to flash on, it would reboot and go back or reinstall android and then boot.

 

In the end i gave up on installing Armbian to the flash  and just installed the same Android 7 image on all three km8's.

 

 

Ah, I understand now. It must be some kind of failsafe feature in the Android image, if the original u-boot detects that the Android partitions have been changed, it automatically launches a reinstall/reboot process. Good to know. I'll have to try the eMMC install on my Km8-P's and see what happens. Thank you for the warning. :thumbup:

 

Edit

====

 

OK, I have installed Armbian on the eMMC of my Km8-P 1G/8G Android TV box using the install.sh script, and it works perfectly - zero problems!

Edited by AndrewDB
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On 2/20/2019 at 4:23 PM, AndrewDB said:

Mecool Km8-P

 

I am testing Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_20190211.img.xz with meson-gxm-q201.dtb on Mecool Km8-P S912 1G/8G, booting from an SD card right now but I intend to flash Armbian on the eMMC later.

USB works. Ethernet works. Not tested HDMI output (using TV box as headless server).

 

Previously was using same TV box with Armbian 5.44 with 3.14.29 and that worked fine too.

 

As usual many many thanks to Oleg (balbes150) who has done an amazing good work on the Linux kernel and creating those images. :thumbup:

Just wanted to report on the status of my three Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.

- All three boxes have now had their firmware flashed with an older Android version which includes a u-boot that correctly boots 4.xx kernels. The u-boot version in the shipped factory firmware on this recent batch of Km8-P boxes would boot kernel 3.14.29 fine but would absolutely refuse to boot any 4.xx/5.xx kernel.

- All three boxes are now running Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_20190211.img.xz with meson-gxm-q201.dtb. This release has proved to be exceptionally stable on these Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.

- Two boxes are running Armbian from a Sandisk A1 SD card. On one box I have installed Armbian on the eMMC, simply executing the install.sh script did the trick without any problems.

- I use these boxes in headless mode (no monitor, keyboard or mouse, access through ssh) as distcc compile nodes and they perform admirably. I can compile the Linux kernel in under 15 minutes on my compile farm.

- These boxes run at a cool 38~42C (depending on room temperature) at idle and 72~76C under heavy load and do not require any special cooling. I have not observed any thermal throttling even under heavy load.

- I have benchmarked the Km8-P using both sbc-bench and the Phoronix Benchmark Suite, see the thread I started on the subject of benchmarking an inexpensive S912 TV box. In summary, these Km8-P boxes place in the middle of the pack for single-threaded benchmarks and at the top of the pack for multithreaded benchmarks, and are the best in terms of performance per dollar compared to any other SBC, as of February 2019.

- I have not tested any of the multimedia capabilities: audio, video decoding, 3D graphics acceleration, HDMI, etc.

 

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On 2/23/2019 at 10:21 AM, AndrewDB said:

Just wanted to report on the status of my three Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.

- All three boxes have now had their firmware flashed with an older Android version which includes a u-boot that correctly boots 4.xx kernels. The u-boot version in the shipped factory firmware on this recent batch of Km8-P boxes would boot kernel 3.14.29 fine but would absolutely refuse to boot any 4.xx/5.xx kernel.

- All three boxes are now running Armbian_5.75_Aml-s912_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.20.5_20190211.img.xz with meson-gxm-q201.dtb. This release has proved to be exceptionally stable on these Mecool Km8-P TV boxes.

- Two boxes are running Armbian from a Sandisk A1 SD card. On one box I have installed Armbian on the eMMC, simply executing the install.sh script did the trick without any problems.

- I use these boxes in headless mode (no monitor, keyboard or mouse, access through ssh) as distcc compile nodes and they perform admirably. I can compile the Linux kernel in under 15 minutes on my compile farm.

- These boxes run at a cool 38~42C (depending on room temperature) at idle and 72~76C under heavy load and do not require any special cooling. I have not observed any thermal throttling even under heavy load.

- I have benchmarked the Km8-P using both sbc-bench and the Phoronix Benchmark Suite, see the thread I started on the subject of benchmarking an inexpensive S912 TV box. In summary, these Km8-P boxes place in the middle of the pack for single-threaded benchmarks and at the top of the pack for multithreaded benchmarks, and are the best in terms of performance per dollar compared to any other SBC, as of February 2019.

- I have not tested any of the multimedia capabilities: audio, video decoding, 3D graphics acceleration, HDMI, etc.

 

Juste received this TV box. I'll try it next week. Could you please point to the tutorial to downgrade android?

 

Thanks!

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5 hours ago, Michel said:

Juste received this TV box. I'll try it next week. Could you please point to the tutorial to downgrade android?

 

Thanks!

Check my post here, you must prepare a micro SD card with the Android image from 4pda using one of the two methods in the CNX article, then:

- Flash it, including u-boot.

- Then prepare a USB key with Armbian 5.75 pointed above and install it using the usual method (see first post in relevant thread).

- Before you do all that, I suggest you try the Km8 P for a few days using Armbian 5.44 with kernel 3.14.29, installed with USB key, it works fine with this version too.

 

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Just noticed that Khadas has released a new version of their S912 Vim2:

https://www.khadas.com/product-page/new-vim2

It's certainly much more expensive than a TV box but if you are developing or experimenting with the S912 I think it's the best solution around.

I certainly hope Oleg gets a courtesy sample seeing as he has done so much work on Armbian for S9XXXX . :thumbup:

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10 minutes ago, Seasalt said:

Ridiculously expensive when the s922x hard kernel for $63 has been announced and shipping next month.

Compared to other development boards the Khadas Vim2 is actually quite inexpensive. So I would say that if the $63 price for the S922X Odroid N2 is confirmed, it would provide exceptional value per dollar. And I certainly hope Oleg gets one, courtesy of HardKernel. Also the Panfrost developers should get one ASAP.

 

In the meantime though, I'll be very happy with my $25 S912 Km8-P TV boxes.  Just can't beat that low cost! ;)

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Just now, AndrewDB said:

In the meantime though, I'll be very happy with my $25 S912 Km8-P TV boxes.  Just can't beat that low cost! 

I could not agree more. On bang for buck no argument.

 

But when I bought mine only the Mecool km8p 1gb ram version was available.

 

I wish I had the 2gb version.

 

My KM8p one gb version shows up as only having approximately 812mb of Ram in htop? Not 1gb as I see on my 1gb orange pi's with zram running.

 

are you seeing on you km8p the same amount of 812mb ram?

 

Oleg made zram  ram compression work and that has been a godsend.

 

Have you any idea where the missing 180mb of Ram is being used. If it is allocated to video I want it back.

 

When I run Corelec it says from memory about 812mb ram available as well.

 

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2 minutes ago, Seasalt said:

I could not agree more. On bang for buck no argument.

 

But when I bought mine only the Mecool km8p 1gb ram version was available.

 

I wish I had the 2gb version.

 

My KM8p one gb version shows up as only having approximately 812mb of Ram in htop? Not 1gb as I see on my 1gb orange pi's with zram running.

 

are you seeing on you km8p the same amount of 812mb ram?

 

Oleg made zram  ram compression work and that has been a godsend.

 

Have you any idea where the missing 180mb of Ram is being used. If it is allocated to video I want it back.

 

When I run Corelec it says from memory about 812mb ram available as well.

 

Check the beginning of the output of the dmesg command, you'll see how the kernel allocates RAM, it actually reserves those 180MB for various purposes.

 

andrew@km8p1:~$ dmesg
[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0000000000 [0x410fd034]
[    0.000000] Linux version 4.20.5-aml-s912 (root@vbox) (gcc version 7.2.1 20171011 (Linaro GCC 7.2-2
017.11)) #5.75 SMP PREEMPT Mon Feb 11 17:40:28 MSK 2019
[    0.000000] Machine model: Amlogic Meson GXM (S912) Q201 Development Board
[    0.000000] OF: reserved mem: failed to allocate memory for node 'linux,cma'
[    0.000000] cma: Reserved 256 MiB at 0x0000000023400000
[    0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 224000
[    0.000000]   DMA32 zone: 3520 pages used for memmap
[    0.000000]   DMA32 zone: 0 pages reserved
[    0.000000]   DMA32 zone: 224000 pages, LIFO batch:63
[    0.000000] psci: probing for conduit method from DT.
[    0.000000] psci: PSCIv0.2 detected in firmware.
[    0.000000] psci: Using standard PSCI v0.2 function IDs
[    0.000000] psci: Trusted OS migration not required
[    0.000000] random: get_random_bytes called from start_kernel+0xa8/0x400 with crng_init=0
[    0.000000] percpu: Embedded 23 pages/cpu @(____ptrval____) s54744 r8192 d31272 u94208
[    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: s54744 r8192 d31272 u94208 alloc=23*4096
[    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: [0] 0 [0] 1 [0] 2 [0] 3 [0] 4 [0] 5 [0] 6 [0] 7  
[    0.000000] Detected VIPT I-cache on CPU0
[    0.000000] CPU features: enabling workaround for ARM erratum 845719
[    0.000000] CPU features: detected: Kernel page table isolation (KPTI)
[    0.000000] Built 1 zonelists, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 220480
[    0.000000] Kernel command line: root=LABEL=ROOTFS rootflags=data=writeback rw console=ttyAML0,1152
00n8 console=tty0 no_console_suspend consoleblank=0 fsck.fix=yes fsck.repair=yes net.ifnames=0
[    0.000000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
[    0.000000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[    0.000000] Memory: 586756K/896000K available (12990K kernel code, 1020K rwdata, 4176K rodata, 576K
init, 787K bss, 47100K reserved, 262144K cma-reserved)

For my use case, 1GB has been enough, I have never run out of memory. But yes, the 2GB Km8-P for $33 or so is also a very good value.
 

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3 minutes ago, AndrewDB said:

Check the beginning of the output of the dmesg command, you'll see how the kernel allocates RAM, it actually reserves those 180MB for various purposes.

Can we steel some of that ram memory back? 812 is not enough to run a basic web page browser. It just chokes but an extra 50k Ram might just be enough to get over the ram shortage.

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3 minutes ago, Seasalt said:

Can we steel some of that ram memory back? 812 is not enough to run a basic web page browser. It just chokes but an extra 50k Ram might just be enough to get over the ram shortage.

Probably you could get some RAM back by passing the kernel some command line parameters, check adding "cma=64" to the command line and see what happens.

 

https://lwn.net/Articles/396707/

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10 minutes ago, AndrewDB said:

Probably you could get some RAM back by passing the kernel some command line parameters, check adding "cma=64" to the command line and see what happens.

 

https://lwn.net/Articles/396707/

Interesting read.

 

So since Corelec and Armbian Oleg's s912 show approx 812mb ram available then they possibly both pre-use about the same amount of Ram.

 

If I type cma=64 into a terminal Oleg's armbian s912 should / could allocate a smaller amount of reserved ram?

 

 

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