We’ve been working on improving our thermal governing to prevent some scenarios where the Vero 4K can overheat and we have to shut the device off. We’re also aware that some users simply want to see the temperature of their device: something we’ve had issues with before.
While it’s extremely rare for your device to overheat, the main purpose for our testing is to ensure that our changes do not cause crashes.
We planned to enable thermal sensor support in 2017 to report temperatures, but the driver had some issues. These issues have now been resolved.
You can now check the temperature of your device using cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp. We will add temperature display to Kodi shortly.
Simply put, we’d appreciate it if users could test these improvements and confirm no lockups or issues over a 24 hour period. We have also increased the GPU base frequency by 33%. This should offer a more fluid experience, particularly when using more complex skins.
Add the following line: deb http://apt.osmc.tv stretch-devel main
Run the following commands to update: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && reboot
Your system should have have received the update.
We’d also like to ensure that we don’t see performance regressions from these changes.
I also recommend you edit /etc/apt/sources.list again and remove the line that you added after updating. This will return you to the normal update channel.
Would this allow any skin/add-on that currently displays CPU temperature to do so? In other words, is this something that Kodi exposes, and the driver will allow Kodi on the Vero to fetch the temperature?
So far, so good. Initial temperature after the install & reboot was 70000 (70’c?).
Playing a 70GB 4K file over NFS got it up to 72000.
Jumped in and out of several menu’s (Aeon Nox theme) [unscientifically] felt slightly more responsive.
Playing smaller TV episodes temperature dropped to 65000.
I would usually experience the crashing/playback stuck at 0:00:00 issue after every 2-4 video’s after a reboot. I ran about 15 different ones during my testing without an issue so far.
Hope that helps. If you need any logs or other info just let me know.
If I get any instability in the coming days I will post a follow-up, otherwise assume no news is good news!
Thanks Sam & team!
UPDATED 27/4/18: Unfortunately the crashing issue is still happening intermittently on playback, but has been a lot better (now ~1 a day, rather than 5+ times a day). Temperature at the last crash was 67000. I will update the other post as this was happening before the thermal driver update so I don’t think it’s related. As I say, if anything the issue improved notably after applying this. Thanks.
We’ve updated Kodi last night to display the temperature under system information - that will probably allow skins to show the temperature as well. (I don’t use one that shows the temperature anywhere else other than the system information page to test with)
If you update again on stretch-devel today you should get this update.
As Sam recommends, after updating you should remove stretch-devel from your sources.list again - because while stretch-devel is stable right at the moment, it is our development and testing repo so as we continue to work on things it may become unstable or have not yet tested changes in it again.