Hi guys. A CE and Amlogic noob here, sorry for the rookie concerns. After decades of building my own expenive HTPCs I recently bought the excellent Minix U9-H box, which outperforms anything I have had before. Performance is so good that I considered buying another one.
But, after reading some more threads and posts about this matter I was discouraged, a bit. In another thread, there were no doubt that most Amlogic platform will lose the Kodi Support from Kodi19. That would be a shame of course, eventhough I, to some extent, understand why.
It appears that this thread shed some new light on this topic? Posts from last summer makes me a bit confused what this really means, but later posts insinuates that this might not be the end of the road for for instance S912 and Kodi19 and onwards? Is this a correct conclusion from my side? If someone more with more technical knowledge can confirm this or tell me in plain english what the resent discoveries means in practice, I would be very grateful.
I do understand that the switch to a new kernel is not made quickly, and it will take time to have it in place.
quote @chewitt : S912 has a bright future. See YouTube for evidence. Panfrost still has some serious bugs to solve before we can think about public testing, but considering the infancy of panfrost code it’s in good shape. The lead panfrost developers have publicly stated good Kodi support is one of their goals !
Thanks Dan. Google Translate told me that there is hope, but we need to wait and see! Maybe a more cheap S905X box is the weapon of choice before we know more. Thanks
This patchset contains the initial changes for upstreaming the driver… As for shaders, the complete Midgard toolchain is included (assembler, disassembler, compiler), which provides immediate utility via the standalone interface…Panfrost is not ready for general use yet; please do not misinterpret this upstreaming as anything more than what’s necessary to ease rebasing. These patches do not include the actual command stream driver…
There’s still a long way to go but that signals great progress.
If you feel unable to contribute code to the Panfrost driver, you can always help out Alyssa Rosenzweig financially. Alyssa is the main driving force behind the Panfrost GPU driver.
When Panfrost is released it will go a long way to realizing the real potential of these Amlogic chips.
Its in the development stage of just about usable (with many features missing) at a push. It could be 6mths before any solid progress is made or it could be a year. Message - don’t hold your breath.
If you are desperate to test this not ready for market project then swing over to Libreelec and try some of their Mainline test builds, not ready for the living room would be the take home message.
Progress is being made on both the Panfrost and Lima projects but from the point of creating complete workable drivers there still not there. Certian functions and pieces are slowly being created/fixed but some key peices are still missing and they are the hardest and some of the most important pieces yet to be tackled.
