V2 drivers

[prl]

The V2 drivers seem to be quite old, dated 20190808. The drivers in use in the OpenViX Octogon SF 8008, which is essentially the same hardware, are 2020-06-13, and a recent post in the oe-alliance github issues area suggests that newer drivers are available which fix a number of problems with 2020-06-13.

[peteru]

There are a number of technical issues with updating V2 drivers. It's not just a simple single driver replacement like on the T-series. There are a lot of libraries and other changes, including the layout of the flash memory.

We certainly can't just use drivers from other boxes, even if they are similar. There could be subtle hardware changes, such as different GPIO use. Wrong drivers could lead to hardware damage. There are also copy protection measures in place to prevent driver sharing.

Updating the driver is on the roadmap, but probably at least a month away. Before jumping on that, I'd like to get the current beta promoted to a full release.

[adoxa]

Looked at that package and only four files were different. Tried them, but didn't notice any difference.

[prl]

I just wanted to flag the fact that there were new drivers available for the chipset and that they may contain significant bug fixes. The 2020-06-13 drivers for the SF8008 run just fine in ViX on my V2. All that needs changing on the SF8008 ViX to let it run on the V2 is to hack libreader to bypass its stupid MAC address check.

[peteru]

I just wanted to flag the fact that there were new drivers available for the chipset and that they may contain significant bug fixes.

Yes there are updates to multiple closed source components from the ODM. It's not just the drivers. The most recent update that I have is dated 20200624. There are no changelogs or any other information to document what has changed. I requested that information but have not received anything. Based on (limited) testing, there are no apparent significant bug fixes. As Mr.Quade reported elsewhere, there is a change in behaviour when it comes to playback of streams that contain vorbis audio, but it's still broken enough to be unusable and therefore not worth switching at this stage.

The 2020-06-13 drivers for the SF8008 run just fine in ViX on my V2. All that needs changing on the SF8008 ViX to let it run on the V2 is to hack libreader to bypass its stupid MAC address check.

You should not need to do that. I am pretty sure that captain added the most recent V2 drivers to oe-a, so V2 builds of OpenATV and other bleeding edge images that are built against the oe-a "moving target base image" should have the latest available drivers for the V2.

[prl]

The problem that I patch for isn't the drivers. /usr/bin/libreader is started in the init.d scripts, and halts startup if the OUI part of the machine's MAC address doesn't match magic values for the address denoting the hardware that the image is permitted to run on.

[peteru]

I know about the libreader copy protection, but you should not need to use the libreader from SF8008. There is a Beyonwiz specific binary available in oe-a. The most recent version of libreader is dated 20200612, which goes hand in hand with the 20200613 Beyonwiz drivers, also available in oe-a.

[MrQuade]

I still have to bugger around with it on my beta-v2 unfortunately .

It limits my ability to multiboot since I can only currently patch a recovery image.

[prl]

I know about the libreader copy protection, but you should not need to use the libreader from SF8008. There is a Beyonwiz specific binary available in oe-a. The most recent version of libreader is dated 20200612, which goes hand in hand with the 20200613 Beyonwiz drivers, also available in oe-a.

There is no ViX build for the V2. In either case, taking the V2 libreader from OE-Alliance, or patching the SF8008 one, I still need to unpack the SF8008 installer and replace its libreader.

And I still need to check before any online upgrade that it doesn't include the libreader package.

I eventually found where the information is in the OE-Alliance repository to whor lout the URL from which to download the V2 libreader, but it seems no easier to use that than the current script I have that does the unpack/patch/repack.