André's Blog

After getting Kodi running on my BananaPi, some issues remained, For example, there was no visualisation while playing music. It turned out that visualisations are split of from the main kodi package. While in the upstream Arch Linux, the visualisation packages are in the repository, they’re not in the repository for ArchLinuxARM. Compiling the modules myself gave a plugin but no visual effects. The cause turned out to be the visualisations linked against the MESA implementation of OpenGLES, rather then the sunxi implementation.

To make it work with the sunxi header files, edit the /usr/lib/pkgconfig/glesv2.pc file, and make the includedir point to
includedir=${prefix}/include/GLES2. When compiling visualisations now, they work perfectly.

Another problem, mentioned in previous post, was the crash on using the Media Library. The crash on the Media Library seems like an issue not related to the Mali/Allwinner specific. Attaching a debugger revealed the following:

#0  0xb5b05c2c in std::local_Rb_tree_decrement (__x=0x17584e4) at /build/gcc/src/gcc/libstdc++-v3/src/c++98/tree.cc:98
#1  0x0044d184 in std::_Rb_tree_iterator > std::_Rb_tree, std::_Select1st >, std::less, std::allocator > >::_M_emplace_hint_unique, std::tuple<> >(std::_Rb_tree_const_iterator >, std::piecewise_construct_t const&, std::tuple&&, std::tuple<>&&) ()
#2  0x00b72018 in DatabaseUtils::GetDatabaseResults(std::__cxx11::basic_string, std::allocator > const&, std::vector > const&, std::unique_ptr > const&, std::vector, std::allocator > >, std::allocator, std::allocator > > > >&) ()

At #2, we see a std::__cxx11::basic_string, while in #0, we see some c++98 references. It seems like a C++ 11 String is getting into some C++ 98 code. The gcc documentation states

Not all uses of the new ABI will cause changes in symbol names, for example a class with a std::string member variable will have the same mangled name whether compiled with the old or new ABI. 

A quick google reveals users of other ARM boards are suffering from the same issue, and, as my analysis of mixing up C++ 11 and C++ 98 code, seems confirmed by this forum thread.. So I tried a build from AUR with the suggested CXXFLAGS=--disable-libstdcxx-dual-abi added to the PKGBUILD. This can by done by adding export CXXFLAGS=--disable-libstdcxx-dual-abi just below export PYTHON_VERSION=2 (line 81).

For each package built from AUR, we need to add armv7h to the arch section. The AUR is targetting upstream ArchLinux, and thus only adding i686 and x86-64 to the supported architectures.

Also note: select jre7 when asked what jre version is to be instaled. jre8 will crash during compilation.

However this doesn’t work. It complains about missing libcrossguid, even though it is installed. The real issue here is that the compiler (gcc 6.1.1) doesn’t recognise the flags I gave it.

cc1plus: error: unknown pass libstdcxx-dual-abi specified in -fdisable


Another compiler flag that should disable the new ABI is-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0. This appears to be accepted by the gcc 6.1 compiler. I was unable to finish the build due running out of space on the /tmp file system. As this process has taken up enough time today already, I’ll finish it another time