Gentoo for Amlogic S9xx (TV box S905\S905X\S912)

fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

@mDup
Yes - I given up with upstream kernel for now. Will use 3.14.29 kernel from LibreELEC till upstream support gets better.

BTW: I even mailed BayLibre (they seems to maintain most of Amlogic code in the kernel) and asked them if they would be interested in Kickstarter campaign like Bootlin did for Allwinner VPU support:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-support-in-the-official-linux-kernel

Would be happy to pledge some money myself. Sadly i got no response ....
I guess we can only wait.

Thanks

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

I don't know what box you own, and how propense you are to risk, but there might be another option:
the official 4.9 kernel from amlogic.
It is shipped with boxes that run Android 7, the board inside them is (most of the times) identical to that of boxes running Android 6 but with a different firmware. If your box came with Android <7 the 4.9 kernel might or might not boot with th old firmware, hdmi won't almost certainly work.
Well it is unlikely that the vendor offers upgrades to Andoid 7 for your box, but if look carefully in some questionable forums you might find that someone has cooked an Andoid 7 update of dubious provenance for your box. If you are lucky enough to update the box (and the firmware) to Android 7 you can use kernel 4.9, which is certainly a big upgrade over 3.14.xx.
Needless to say the probability that you brick your box upgrading the firmware is very high :-)

but you will certainly be able to use kernel 4.9 if you do, just buy a new box that ships with Android 7 if you brick it :lol:

just booting the 4.9 on the old firmware should be safe instead, but remember hdmi will almost certainly not work..

Use the khadas VIM2 git for the 4.9 Amlogic kernel.
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fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

@erm67
My box is running Android 7 by default so i have high hopes.
Will try 4.9 kernel now

Thank you for the tip.

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

Use the latest original dtb (or none) first.
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fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

I have S905W box (and kvim2 is S912) so i tried latest firmware for vim1:
http://docs.khadas.com/basics/FirmwareResources/
http://www.mediafire.com/file/85n5qnc9om0xg3t/VIM_Ubuntu-mate-16.04_Linux-4.9_SD-USB_V180207.7z

HDMI does not work.
I also tried Armbian with same kernel version by balbes150 and got same result.

Without dtb booting does not start.

Thanks

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

The kernel is the same for all Amlogic chipsets, but I cannot find the sources for 4.9 anymore in the khadas git, maybe they switched back to 3.14?

The dtb required is the original from your vendor, not from the opensource linux meson.

Without a serial is very hard to know what is going on :-)

Wait at least 10 minutes and try to see if the eth gets an IP from the dhcp server and comes up (answers to ping) wait some more time and the ssh port should be open.

Maybe an S905X dtb will work (some people uses it with libreelec)

https://sx05.eu/s905/8.2/device_trees/S905X/

kernel 4.9 uses the same dtb.

I see that S905W is a bit problematic
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balbes150 · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2016 Posts: 10

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

Ahh thank you, but it got only one commit in the last few months...... apart the dts of course.

It locks randomly after a while, I was hoping for some real development :-)

Unless the problem was really fs/aufs/vdir.c

I guess I stay with 3.14 until things improve, the few syscalls missing are not blockers yet.
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fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

Got no IP assigned but i guess that system must be setup first (at least its the Armbian case).
Lack of HDMI is a deal breaker anyway. Going back to 3.14.29 as well.

fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

USB support seems to be coming to the mainline 4.17.x kernel

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10277529/
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10277537/

Now only sound left (have no hopes for the SSV6051 wifi chip) and i'm set

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

usb2 is a terrible interface anyway.
ome board have USB3.1 instead that is a lot better, like the ROCK64, even the next raspi will allegedly support USB3...

with kernel 4.15 everything I use works on my board ...
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mDup · Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 212

fanthom · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 60

@erm67
Please provide your box model name. Is internal eMMC supported, wifi, sound and everything? Does it have RTC chip?

Thanks

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

It is a S912 board with 2G ram, and I have no eMMC on board (I should have a bought a slightly cheaper one) the NAND is not supported but even it was it's unusable...
It boots only with the khadas-vim2 dtb (only the led give some error, but....) and I am using balbes150 4.14.11+ kernel from git (ATM). Also 4.16 boots but I haven't tested it.
USB works very well (for a USB2 host anyway), eth is very stable, no problems with root on iscsi and iscsi swap. It is a nextcloud headless server so I don't really care about hdmi and sound.

I plan to replace it with something else that has a usb3 host or 2 gbit eth soon :-)

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mDup · Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 212

erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

mainline + some patches probably:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/01/24/mainline-linux-on-amlogic-s905-s905x-s912-soc-2018-status-update/

I boot from SD card since the board doesn't have an emmc, I optimized the ext4 filesystem on it with flashbench from linaro and it's a lot faster now:

https://blogofterje.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/optimizing-fs-on-sd-card/
https://git.linaro.org/people/arnd.bergmann/flashbench.git

I used to boot from iscsi but having a small root on a local media is better. Network is as fast as the EMMC I had on the 905X board I had previously.

This is the kernel:
https://github.com/150balbes/Amlogic_s905-kernel
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balbes150 · n00b Joined: 03 Dec 2016 Posts: 10

To run the kernel without an initrd, use "root=UUID=PARTUID"in the kernel command line parameters. Please note that this is not a UUID, it is a PARTUID. It can be recognized by the command

partx --show /dev/sda

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b5af921ec02333e943efb59aca4f56b78fc0e100

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 11:48 am Post subject:

balbes150,

Check your syntax.
Your link says

The_Pope · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2016 Posts: 111

Hi again,

I'm now trying to install Gentoo on a USB drive attached to this media box.

The setup is:

- I boot from a different USB drive which has your Armbian 5.64 build (essentially that's my Gentoo boot CD)
- I just follow the Gentoo handbook - partition the other drive, download stage3, chroot, etc.

The problem is the bootloader. Grub tries to install for arm64-efi, but then says "EFI variables are not supported on this system."

I looked for this problem and found that if you exit chroot, so into Armbian, you should be able to see a module called efivars.
From inside the Armbian console, logged as root, lsmod doesn't show any efivars.
modprobe efivars returns "modprobe: FATAL: Module efivars not found in directory /lib/modules/4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx"
/sys/firmware doesn't contain anything that reads efi
modprobe -r efivars (which would remove the existing efivars module) returns "modprobe: FATAL: Module efivars not found."

So this box runs some weird, non-standard EFI? Which Armbian somehow manages to match, with U-boot?

Inside the chroot, I managed to compile a kernel from gentoo-sources (using make, as there's no genkernel willing to work on arm64)

I would just clone the Armbian boot partition on the Gentoo drive, then replace files like the kernel, initrd or initramfs. But they're not the same!

Armbian boot partition contains:

System.map-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx
aml_autoscript
aml_autoscript.cmd
aml_autoscript.zip
armbianEnv.txt
armbian_first_run.txt.template
boot-desktop.png
boot.bmp
config-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx
emmc_autoscript
emmc_autoscript.cmd
initrd.img-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx
s905_autoscript
s905_autoscript.cmd
s905x-uboot.img
s912-uboot.img
uEnv.ini
uInitrd
uInitrd-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx
vmlinuz-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx
zImage

Gentoo boot partition contains just:

config-4.19.1-gentoo
System.map-4.19.1-gentoo
vmlinuz-4.19.1-gentoo

My Gentoo /etc/fstab file already contains the correct UUIDs for all the partitions I use.

Now, maybe this "bootloader hacking" is a bad idea and I can install a bootloader the normal way. I can't understand much of the U-boot documentation, which I believe is what Armbian uses.
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mDup · Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 212

The_Pope · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2016 Posts: 111

Ok, thank you for that!

The year old image is probably easy enough to update. It will probably have an older profile and an older portage version, those are the essentials. The rest of the things can get updated pretty easily. So I personally don't need an updated image, but others may.

I would prefer, however, to know how to create my own image. The device already has multi-boot, in fact the internal memory has a LibreElec install on it. I'd happily put Gentoo there, later on.

For now, I definitely need to make the USB drive boot on its' own. I like to have control over my own partition layout, which is mostly why I want to generate bootable Gentoo USB drives on my own.

I boot this machine with balbes150's Armbian 5.64 build. Then chroot into Gentoo. Then what do I do to make it bootable? This is what I need answers for, at the moment. Do I have to copy aml_autoscript and s905_autoscript from the Armbian /boot partition? Okay.

But you say I need:

initrd.img-4.19.0-gentoo
System.map-4.19.0-gentoo
uInitrd
zImage

How can I get Gentoo to generate them, or which /boot Gentoo files correspond to these?

Again, Gentoo has this:

config-4.19.1-gentoo
System.map-4.19.1-gentoo
vmlinuz-4.19.1-gentoo

I don't think I have to care about the mismatched kernel versions, but the rest? vmlinuz from the Gentoo /boot is to be renamed to what? To zImage?
The initrd.img-4.19.0-rc7-aml-s9xxx file, how can I get Gentoo to generate an equivalent file, like you say, initrd.img-4.19.0-gentoo? Same question for the file "uInitrd" which you say is needed. I believe you, that's not the issue, but how do I get Gentoo to provide/generate it?!
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mDup · Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 212

The_Pope · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2016 Posts: 111

Oh, excellent. Thank you so much. That's what I was after, really.

I have a few questions, though. An older Gentoo user who keeps writing howto files (but for some reason, never published any of them - I guess he believes they're too specific) told me, for x86 and x64, to run genkernel negating clean and mrproper. So my reflex is to not do make clean and make mrproper - is that good, bad, acceptable?

He says that, before chrooting into Gentoo, one should do zcat /proc/config.gz > /mnt/gentoo/usr/src/linux/.config
You say make oldconfig and then make prepare. Isn't it better if I do what he said, then inside the chroot, make oldconfig AND make menuconfig? It's faaar less tedious to check everything with that text-mode menu interface.

Thirdly, make -j7 Image (I didn't specify any j value so that it uses the one in make.conf) failed: "make: *** [Makefile:1032: vmlinux] Error 1" and before that, a lot of undefined reference errors.

EDIT: Right, I did make oldconfig but then also make menuconfig, was indeed far easier to set everything I needed, closed and saved, then make Image worked.
But, funnily, make modules didn't work because I hadn't set "enable loadable modules support" ... :mrgreen:

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mDup · Apprentice Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 212

The_Pope · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2016 Posts: 111

Too good to be true, as always.

Your image boots, at least. But it detects zero network interfaces! This box appears to have a Broadcomm Wi-Fi adapter and some wired adapter that never worked. I think Armbian detects it but can't use it, or something like that. This particular version of Armbian also can't use the integrated wi-fi adapter so I had to plug in another, external one, with an Atheros chip. That one worked (I also couldn't, for the life of me, set it up in text mode, had to start X just to connect to the Wi-Fi network) and that's how I managed to maintain the Gentoo install in the chroot.
Your Gentoo image can't detect any of those. Maybe I can recompile the kernel and just check all the possible network drivers, as I should have everything I need. By the way, LibreElec detects both wired and wireless network interfaces just fine. How in the world do they manage to do that, I wonder.

The image I made, however, that one does disk activity, restarts by itself during it, then repeats the same process. I checked everywhere, I pasted the root partition UUID and label in both /boot/uEnv.ini and /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf, I copied the proper dtb file as dtb.img in /boot ... nothing.

If you want, we could switch to PMs and maybe post how to get out of the problem, or what in the world I did wrong.
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