Allwinner H618
Kayleen Dauteuil
I recently I bought a TV box with an h618 processor And I want to install Linux to make it a server but I only find images for the h616 processor, can I install one of these images on my TV box? It seems that the h616 processor and the h618 procesador are almost the same
I haven't had much time to work on this, but simplistically, the problem is that the DRAM chips and how they are wired up on my Transpeed box are different from the Orange Pi image I attempted to use, so the AllWinner chip DRAM setup has to be different.
Unless someone can find a U-Boot/image setup for an Allwinner H616/H618 board with the same DRAM chip setup - 8 4G DDR3 chips, or alternatively figure out how to configure U-Boot for this DRAM, we are stuck.
I had an intensive search for the methods to boot in H618, most of them don't even mention this processor. When I was watching some videos I did get realized that some images gets trouble when booting by USB device and just work with USD Card booted with Balena Etcher, have you tried?
Though the documentation about H616 seems more popular and maybe could be more easy to make it boot with some of H616 images. I would like to do some tests but, well I'm still not with my transpeed, I bought in a black friday sale and didnt even Googled about the armbian compatibility. Now its too late, i'll have to wait it arrives and try some things. I could easily buy another TV Box but I couldnt see any device that has 4GB RAM and its also compatible with armbian.
e.g. booting from emmc vs sd card practically is different on the same board. And for every different board there is a different dts (device tree), that alone may cause enough problems using an image on a board. The nearly only way left is to *build from source* and do *further developments* a 'difficult' endeavour.
I've been trying to find the DRAM setting for this board. I found a firmware update that might help. Got it from androidpctv.com/firmware-transpeed-h618/ . I used the firmware unpacker from xdaforums.com/t/tool-imgrepacker-livesuits-phoenixsuits-firmware-images-unpacker-packer.1753473/ .
I used the Windows version of imgRePacker.exe to extract the boot0_nand.fex. Then read the boot0_nand.fex in linux using command hexedit boot0_nand.fex. It looks very close to the boot0 Andre Przywara used to find the DRAM settings on his board. lore.kernel.org/linux-sunxi/2123971.irdbgypaU6@jernej-laptop/ .
I just wanted to say thanks for all of your recent posts. Everything you've done has helped me get my TANIX TX68 H618 4GB DDR3 64GB eMMC Android TV up & running under Armbian. The main difference I can see is that my WiFi chip is running AllWinner's AW869A chip. Like you, my immediate need is to get the WiFi working and break out a monitor and see if HDMI is functional. Just a +1 that your GitHub repo was spot-on and I chose what I thought were all the right settings to get me started.
Awesome, I was hoping my posts would help others with boxes based on the H618. Like ag123 pointed out. There are a lot of boxes that are similar but with different configurations. If I can post enough information and steps on how to setup these boxes we can get enough of them up and running. These boxes are now adding more RAM and larger eMMC's. I think it's a good time to support Armbian development on TV boxes. The original Android that came with this box was very basic. It wouldn't allow me to install most the apps I wanted. So I decided to hack it.
@Nick A just introduced me to this thread, I didn't realise this was even here.. but great to have more people looking at these SoCs.
Thanks for posting the image of the TV box open @rick0cm, I couldn't find many good photos of it online. It's a pretty interesting device for the price!
Most of the patches were taken from orangepi zero3 with very minimal changes. Andre Przywara gave me his transpeed-8k618-t_defconfig. The DRAM settings were the same as mine. He knew more about the config options than I do. So I kept his defconfig. He also gave me the code in dts to get wifi working.
So it appears the builds I have uploaded aren't booting according to @Nick A's testing, so let us figure out why that is before anyone tests these images.. I unfortunately don't have hardware for testing these images, unlike the Orange Pi boards.
No they boot fine... I was building mostly Desktop images. But it would be great to have both Desktop and Server images. I prefer Desktop because I want to get the most out of this TV Box. Hopefully, after we are done we can have decent Hardware acceleration. Using the V4L2.
Yes! That is what I was looking at right now. Thanks iun cuim. I was stuck on the 100mbps ethernet. But it seems Warpme got it working. So I'm going to focus on his patches and see if I can get Transpeed working on Armbian. I got this TV Box a month ago and I didn't know Warpme already did most of the hard work.
I just built a Debian XFCE desktop image and it's now also available from here (a little bit bigger than the previous server images)
-t/
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Has anyone got information on this slightly different Transpeed variant (M98-8K)?
Apparently it's also H618 based, but advertised as Android 13 with a different case without the clock on the front (but most other specs look the same). Would be interesting to see if this board is the same internally and would also work with the same images being built here.