LibreELEC dropping Amlogic support

So it looks like LE is finally dropping Amlogic and they send kszaq to do it, this feels like a betrayal, I’m happy CoreELEC exists, I will never use LE again on any of my devices.

You’ve misunderstood what kszaq has written.
‘LibreELEC focus is on bringing mainline vendor-hack-free support for Amlogic devices (among others).’
Even if they had dropped support talk of ‘betrayal’ is just silly. Will you feel ‘betrayed’ if / when coreelec devs drop support for a device you own or decide not to support one you’d like?

Well to be fair they pointed to us. They have a different goal as we.

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The hack free statement is not nice if it is pointed at us especially because some of these “hacks” came from Kszaq himself. Anyway I’m neither happy nor sad.

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I can’t believe it.
I paid $40 for a Chonga Box and only got 3 to 4 years out of it.
I’ve been had.
Done my Dough.:laughing:

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This will not happen.

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As someone who uses CE and LE and has had no involvement in the arguments I don’t see there’s anything there that’s ‘not nice’. I’m pretty sure kszaq was talking about ‘hacks’ when he was implementing them.

Seriously?
You’re planning (guaranteeing) to support my S905 boxes until the sun explodes?
That’s great news. :grinning:

We will all be long gone when that happens :innocent:

We would only consider it if it was technically impossible to continue due to device constraints, think early Android phones on the latest version of Android, not enough RAM/CPU etc…

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It’s great you feel that way Adam, but as a user I have much lower expectations.
I expect you to support my S905 boxes for as long as you want to.
I expect you to support the new boxes that you decide on.
And I definitely will be pissed if you stop while you have the time and you’re still enjoying developing.
Nobody knows what the future holds.

Well, I’ll not be pissed, will just buy the next box that is supported. Expecting any free support for a cheap Android box for more than 2 years is not my reality.

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Whoooooooosh

Same here…

A complete misreading of the statement. As Kszaq has pointed out - LE never supported AMLogic boxes officially. It was himself and a few others who offered community builds which were never supported by LE. As such you cannot drop something you never supported. Thats an end to that.

The reality is that the official LE team refused to bring the 3.14 kernel with all its AML hacks into the main project, the statement by Kszaq in github is simply a formal statement of this long standing position. It has always been the objective of the LE project to only support AMLogic chips which have mainline support and this is where their active efforts are been applied.

We can be grateful that this decision by the LE team forced those who wanted to bring Kodi into official LE support to branch off and form the CE project so that we could all continue to use our boxes.

The efforts been made by the LE team, and many others, to bring mainline support to AMLogic hardware will eventually bring benefits to us all, including the CE team.

Shoog

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Still got your receipt?

Odroid C2 is an amlogic box and it was officially supported by Libreelec, although kszaq build worked better for me than the “official” build.

The decision was more formally applied on the Leia development cycle. I believe that the Kodi team decision to expunge AMLogic hacks from Kodi brought this to a head. The fact that this never really happened for Kodi Leia suggests that the LE team jumped the gun somewhat.

Shoog

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LE doesn’t have the man power to maintain Amlogic. Thats just the truth. They are playing mainline because then they don’t need to worry about anything once it works. And till then they wait for baylibre to do the heavy lifting.

This is not totally true as there was a number of WeTek devices supported and also the Odroid C2.

As above, these existed already.

This is not totally true, when LE received a “donation” from WeTek for adding support for WeTek devices they didn’t care about mainline when money and hardware was involved.

Mainline is not the be all and end all and answer to all the problems that exist like they would have you believe, you only have to look at how many times patches have been applied each time they bump the Linux kernel to a new main version, it also will not be feature complete in time for Kodi 19 in my opinion.

I think the decisions they are taking is a positive thing though in my opinion, it just means more users will come this way and I genuinely believe users will be better served with CoreELEC and I don’t just say that as a contributor and one of it’s creators but because our support is solely focused on only Amlogic, our user numbers are growing day by day.

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I don’t really care about mainline support, apart from the potential brick wall it represents to future progress. I envisage that if and when it does come it will not produce any significant performance boost. I base this upon experience of all the open source graphics drivers and their relatively poor performance compared to the proprietary drivers they attempt to emulate. My main concern however is that as the relentless release schedule of the ARM based chips carries on the Opensource driver community will simply always be a few years behind the curve (a lifetime in the life of these chips) and the Opensource community will simply lose interest as they have with so many other projects before.

Unless and until Android mandates real mainline compatibility I still see all of this effort been somewhat wasted. In the meantime long live AML Kernel 3.14

Shoog

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