Board crashing/rebooting when launching Kodi

Danish Shaikh

Hi everyone,
I upgraded the ubilinux distro and installed Kodi...

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
<reboot>
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi
<reboot>

and now when I run Kodi, most of the times the board crashes with a black screen of death, or sometimes reboots. The blue power LED also shuts off. When I cycle power, it does not boot (although the blue LED is on), and only when I cycle power the 2nd time it boots again.

Hardware:
UP board 2GB/16GB
TP-Link TL-WN725N usb wifi dongle
Microsoft wired keyboard 600
PSU: 5V 6A (30W)

What is going on? I suspect that Kodi frontend is too heavy for the board??? Which is ridiculous!

Please help, I bought this board to be my media centre

Thank you,
Danny

DCleri

Hi Danny,

First of all, have you applied the WiFi fix as suggested at the end of the ubilinux installation guide?

https://up-community.org/wiki/Realtek_WiFi_dongles_fix

Danish Shaikh

Hi,
Thanks for the info.

I have now installed the patch, but now kodi crashes at startup consistently (black screen of death), and only way to get out is to cycle power two times as before.
Any ideas?

DCleri

Hi Danny,

I have a fresh installation of ubilinux with Kodi and it works like a charm.

You can experience occasional crashes due to a known bug (CHT45 on Intel documentation) which will be solved with an upcoming UEFI BIOS release.

It is not usual for the board to crash at Kodi start up neither consistently...
Is it the system a clean installation or do you have other software configured? If not, could you try to re-install the system and try again kodi?

Danish Shaikh

By the way, the TP-Link TL-WN725N dongle uses the rtl8188 driver and not the rtl8192cu driver....

Danish Shaikh

No, I have a clean install ubilinux with Kodi. I have just now removed and reinstalled Kodi, and it still crashes consistently on startup....maybe something to do with the distro upgrade?

Danish Shaikh

How can I do another clean install of ubilinux?

DCleri

Before we move forward, I double checked and we have tested the boards with the TL-WN823N (and the fix is to improve stability and performance of that one).

Could you try to remove the WiFi dongle and test Kodi again?

Danish Shaikh

yep tried that, still no change...

Danish Shaikh

OK, some weird progress...if I start kodi without the dongle, it doesn't crash. After Kodi starts, I insert the dongle and then I have to everytime manually connect to my router via wext (even though I selected the setting to auto connect everytime). After I have connected to my router, I have internet access....

Also found some error messages (see attachment) while booting the board.

DCleri

OK so it seems we found the issue here.

We haven't tested the dongle so it might be a problem with the driver currently included with the 4.4 kernel.
You can try to look how to compile newer version of that driver which may solve the instability issues or you can replace the dongle with another better supported chip (e.g. TL-WN823N)

Danish Shaikh

You mean it is definitely the dongle?

DCleri

well, I think that if removing the dongle resolve the crashes, the issue is most likely in the WiFi driver for that chip.

You can try to install an updated driver for that chip from other sources (e.g. github).

Searching online there are many tutorials for installing the latest rtl8188eu from github, but I don't have a way to test it.

Danish Shaikh

So for some reason everything works now. I did a fresh install of Ubilinux, but I DID NOT do a

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and neither did I install the RTL8192 WIFI patch as described here -
http://www.up-community.org/wiki/Realtek_WiFi_dongles_fix

And now everything works fine with the TP-Link TL-WN725N dongle, no more kodi crashes. I also purchased the TP-Link TL-WN823N dongle just to test but I haven't tested it so far.

So it seems that the RTL8188EUS/CUS driver can work, but not with the newer 4.4.11-2 kernel....