Starting Friday 13th December nightlies will resume with a new kernel and new media modules for our Amlogic-ng builds.
This has been built from the ground up by the CoreELEC team rather than being forked from Hardkernel or Khadas and is based on the latest Android 4.9 kernel from Amlogic.
We had previously been using the Buildroot 4.9 kernel from Amlogic forked from Hardkernel and had learned that Amlogic is no longer actively developing this which presented a challenge for us given that the latest Amlogic SoC’s (S905X3 and S905D3) was not compatible with it.
Rather than continuing to follow and use a vendor kernel we decided it would be best if we controlled the chain ourselves and started from scratch as this would enable us to move to newer kernels much easier in the future and also pull the latest updates from Amlogic with minimal conflicts.
There is also a huge upgrade to the media modules which is what is directly responsible for hardware decoding that results in much better video playback and more content being playable than ever before, we are now using a multi decoder rather than a single decoder and our changes to the media modules are much more minimal than they were previously in order to keep us more closely aligned to the stock Amlogic code.
We require as much feedback as possible and these builds should be considered highly experimental.
Boxes with older processors like (S905D)
Will they be part of the new kernel version in nightly builds?
I mean this includes the older boxes or just the newer models.
Will there be an upgrade (.tar) file or only fresh install (.gz) version ?
If doing a fresh installation will it be safe to restore a backup from a stable 9.2.1 N2 installation ?
I’m happy to test this, I have an x96 air (s905x3, 4gb, gigabit) . Is this boot from an sd or does it support the new eMMC internal install like the s905x2?
It’s probably a good idea to only do an sd card install when testing nightly builds. To start with these builds with new kernel may have unexpected bugs, and it’s better to discover that when running from an sd card where it’s easy to recover if something goes bad then running from eMMC where it could be very hard to recover if something goes bad.
For anybody that gets weird colours add the following to your /flash/config.ini file.
use_rgb_to_yuv=0
note: For anybody not familiar with editing the contents of the /flash partition. This partition is mounted read only. So you do need to ssh into the device and remount the /flash partition to make it writable. This can be done easily with the following command.
mount -o remount,rw /flash
after which you you can then edit the config.ini file nano /flash/config.ini
then reboot. Colours should now be back to normal.
nightlies will resume with a new kernel and new media modules for our Amlogic-ng builds.
