LibreELEC dropping Amlogic support

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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@Shoog I feel the same, I personally do not think it will not give much… if any performance boost in my opinion, if anything then it will be the opposite, you only have to look at the performance impact that the Linux Spectre/Meltdown bugfixes have had.

We use our devices purely for Kodi and the grunt of all of the work which is video decoding is done in the VPU, mainline will help other projects more like Armbian.

I can tell you from team discussions that nobody is losing interest yet, everybody is quite excited since the arrival of the S922X, it’s not really wasted effort as we do it all for fun at the end of the day and there is a small sense of accomplishment once we get something working that didn’t work previously. :slight_smile:

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100% agree. I hope it will be otherwise, but my experience whispers me “you wish” :slight_smile:

Greetings,

I’m not fully aware of the event, will the LE Team not be able to provide software for Amlogic Chip devices anymore? So, it’s not going to support?
If this is the case, I’m not too surprised because the CE Team had left for them.

And I think that the CE Team is doing very well. Thank you very much.

I also don’t remember when I used the LE software for the last time.
But their loss is great.

And I want this from this group, that group, this group, do not stretch the environment by pulling that.
It hurts both communities. I find it unnecessary, that’s all.

Best regards…

LE is going to drop all Amlogic vendor specific code, which means it’ll only fully work on Amlogic hardware when Amlogic mainline support is completed.

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Which will take a long time. It will only work partly with regressions.

So, you did not get money from Hardkernel to be a sponsor? So, what kind of sponsorship was it? I am pleasantly surprised by your statement.

Nope. They send 6 free devices for some developers.

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Absolutely not, some members of our team received the N2, 2 months prior to its release.

We have never asked for financial support from any user or sponsor for that matter, nor would we ever.

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Hardkernel got a great deal here. For the equivalent of one day salary of a few developers, they are getting such a dedicated group.

Thank you very much. But, I think Hardkernel should give you a percentage of every n2 sold which is being used with Coreelec.

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We are not that way inclined, we are hobbyists :slight_smile:

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I agree with Adam. It is not a real sponsorship I know but we do that for fun. We can finance the server for the forum through ads. So this is all about self running now. We don’t need any money especially from our users.

Yes, but something tangible should drop from Hardkernel onto your accounts :wink:

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I have a very good relationship with Hardkernel since a few years. They have built a nice community and they care. For me the most important part is to have a vendor that cares and supports us.

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