loxins Posted February 9, 2019 Posted February 9, 2019 Hello everybody. Finally I have signed up for the forum. Been reading here for awhile but never really had a reason to signup until now. I got a tv-box the other day which I have been playing around with. I dont have much experience working with the arm64 architecture, I have mostly been playing around with ultrasparc and the mainline architectures. I have no problem getting the system to boot and work but I cannot get all the boards features to work so my OCD is not allowing me to let this pass without exploring all options. The box in question is a s905x MXQ Pro 4K. It has 1gb memory, rtl8189etv wifi chip and what I think is a nand chip rather then a emmc module. Does anybody have any experience with these boxes? I am using custom armbian-built kernel, Linux aml 5.0.0-rc5-next. I cannot get the wifi chip to activate, tried just about everything but no go. Tried various different dtb but it never pops up. This is not a real issue for me since I do prefer cable-connection rather then wifi but I would like to be able to get it running. Maybe I have to modify the dtb but I am not quite sure where to start in that process. Then there is the nand chip. I have very little experience working with there kind of devices. I just cant get any proper, stable signal from that. I honestly am not even sure how I would get it running. I assumed I just needed to mount it like any other storage or mtd-device but I get nothing in /dev nor /proc. I know there is no android there anymore, probably the chip is empty, is there not a way for me to format and use this chip? even if it is slower then a sdcard I would be interested in trying to abuse it alittle. I did manage to see the first partition the other day but I was working on a s912 and orangepi zero plus at the same time so I cannot for the life of me remember how I did that. I think it was through mtd-utils. All I remember is that is was 128mb in size. I cannot get any signal from the board if I connect it to a computer. I did try to flash an android image to the box but I got no response. I tried using a toothpick and tried shortening the nand chip but still got nothing. I have been using the meson-gxl-s905x-p212.dtb, I have tried a few other dtb's but there has been no success in getting the forementioned modules to work. armbianmonitur -u output = http://ix.io/1Az2 here is a photo of the board = https://imgur.com/a/ApvzAfq Any help would be appreciated.
jock Posted February 9, 2019 Posted February 9, 2019 AFAIK 8189ETV driver is not in armbian for meson64 and neither in mainline kernel at the moment. You have to compile it yourself from sources you can find here: https://github.com/jwrdegoede/rtl8189ES_linux You may also integrate it into armbian build system as a patch for the kernel, so when you build your armbian distro you also compile the driver as module: I did it as an experiment in my own armbian fork for mxq-s905-v20 tv box board (which is commercially known as Nexbox MXQ Pro, with S905 SoC) and it works very well. You may try to use this patch, which should be enough to integrate the driver into the kernel during armbian building. Just put the patch in the same directory (patch/kernel/meson64-next) and you should go. If you want to compile the driver yourself on the running system instead, don't forget to install the linux headers first. Side note: the driver works flawlessy with 4.19 kernel, but you report your next flavour is using 5.0 which looks strange to me since 5.0 should be dev flavour. Maybe the driver works on 5.0 too, but I never tried
loxins Posted February 10, 2019 Author Posted February 10, 2019 thanks for your reply jock I will try building an image with the module using the default kernel. Tried the patch last night but it didnt work, probably my bad, I am not very experienced in applying kernel patches. I am still working on the nand controller. I havent had any more success though.
jock Posted February 10, 2019 Posted February 10, 2019 Are you sure you have NAND chip? Usually tv boxes have standard eMMC chips which should be supported by latest mainline kernels: linux-meson.com
loxins Posted February 10, 2019 Author Posted February 10, 2019 Yes I am pretty sure this is a NAND chip. its marked SanDisk x428107001 sdtnrgama-008g hncy151022. I tried shortening out the pins on it trying to get some response. Only response I got was a tiny spark from the pins. Maybe it is just completely dead. I will continue testing it.
loxins Posted February 12, 2019 Author Posted February 12, 2019 Thanks to jock's advise I got the wifi working! Since the patch didnt work for me I used the github module, compiled it for the 4.20 kernel. It did not compile in a pretty way, I had to edit the ioctl_cfg80211.c cause of error related to get_boottime and then I had to create two new files, rtl8188ee_xmit.c and rtl8188ee_recv.c which I just cloned from rtl8189es_recv.c and rtl8189es_xmit.c. Then it finally finished the compile and insmod worked fine and I got wifi working via the 8188ee module. I do get some error "8188ee: module PLT section(s) missing" but it works ok. Next step is to finish my NAND experiments
loxins Posted February 12, 2019 Author Posted February 12, 2019 note to self. after a reboot the module wouldnt load. gave me an " Unknown symbol in module " error. I have to first load the cfg80211 module before 8188ee module, then it works again.
jock Posted February 12, 2019 Posted February 12, 2019 2 minutes ago, loxins said: note to self. after a reboot the module wouldnt load. gave me an " Unknown symbol in module " error. I have to first load the cfg80211 module before 8188ee module, then it works again. maybe sudo depmod -a can be useful to refresh the modules depencies
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