[jdhebden]

Hey all,

I'm hoping someone here has seen this before or can give me some pointers on debugging a weird issue. I've compiled Gotham 13.1 from the tagged release on GitHub on a small Buildroot I'm putting together, and for the life of me can't get any text to display in the menus. I've tried the Confluence and Amber skins, both are the same, there is no text in any of the menus.

I'm running the 3.12 series kernel from the foundation sources, with latest userland libraries (bcm_host, vchostif, etc) and latest firmware. It's been compiled with GCC 4.8 against Glibc 2.19. I've posted as much useful information as I can think of below.

Thanks in advance!

Current buildroot sources are here: https://github.com/jdhebden/buildroot-rpi-xbmc

XBMC Debug Log:
http://pastebin.com/yQWFvi2d

RPi config.txt

Code:

arm_freq=850
core_freq=375
force_turbo=1
gpu_mem=256
disable_overscan=1
hdmi_ignore_cec_init=1

RPi cmdline.txt

Code:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1

I've tried booting over NFS and from SD card and the result is the same, so I've omitted the root parameter.

Screenshot:
http://imgur.com/0W9raZ4

[popcornmix]

No real ideas. You say latest firmware, but the date shows it is two months old. Might be worth updating.
Enable debug logging and post output to pastebin site (you should probably replace the current inline log with a link before a moderator does).
Post a picture of the screen in case there are any clues there.

[jdhebden]

No real ideas. You say latest firmware, but the date shows it is two months old. Might be worth updating.
Enable debug logging and post output to pastebin site (you should probably replace the current inline log with a link before a moderator does).
Post a picture of the screen in case there are any clues there.

Thanks popcornmix, I was updating the log as you were writing this reply
I've added a screenshot as you've recommended.
Regarding the firmware, I've tried with a few different firmware versions, all the same. The most recent I tried was pulled from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master a few days ago, but I will do a fresh clone this morning and give that a shot.

[jdhebden]

OK, I tried the latest firmware:

Code:

00:00:16 T:3046576128  NOTICE: Raspberry PI firmware version: Jun 30 2014 22:04:55
                                            Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
                                            version 87aee38aa98517e53651d3400bf9261beb20c3e7 (clean) (release)

Still the same. I'm wondering if there is some difference between the VideoCore libraries distributed by the RPi Foundation in binary form, and the ones they release the source for, so I'll try the binary ones that are distributed with the firmware later today.

[da-anda]

do you have the same issues with OpenElec releases? The only situation where I had missing glyphs was when my GPU mem was to low (< 192 MB) and I had higher resolution artwork enabled. But no fonts at all is strange. Maybe a freetype issue?

[jdhebden]

do you have the same issues with OpenElec releases? The only situation where I had missing glyphs was when my GPU mem was to low (< 192 MB) and I had higher resolution artwork enabled. But no fonts at all is strange. Maybe a freetype issue?

Thanks for the pointers - I've just donwnloaded and tested the OpenELEC stable release (4.0.6), and that worked fine. Text in the menus and everything

I've taken my compiled buildroot and kernel, and used it with the same cmdline.txt, config.txt and firmware that was shipped with the OpenELEC build, and now have no text again. So it must be something to do with the version of libraries or the software that I have compiled, rather than hardware, firmware or kernel commandline.

I'm going to experiment with different versions of freetype, and see if I can dig up a little more info on how OpenELEC is compiled. Thanks again for your help!

[popcornmix]

There are quite a few errors in your log. I'd suggest having a close look at difference between openelec and your build.
This one is most suspicious, as the UTF conversions are done to text strings, which the error may stop the strings from appearing:

Code:

ERROR: GetConverter: iconv_open() for "UTF-8" -> "UTF-32LE" failed, errno = 22 (Invalid argument)

Most likely an incompatible version of a library, or wrong configure options used when building.

[jdhebden]

There are quite a few errors in your log. I'd suggest having a close look at difference between openelec and your build.
This one is most suspicious, as the UTF conversions are done to text strings, which the error may stop the strings from appearing:

Code:

ERROR: GetConverter: iconv_open() for "UTF-8" -> "UTF-32LE" failed, errno = 22 (Invalid argument)

Most likely an incompatible version of a library, or wrong configure options used when building.

I'd noticed this in the logs but wasn't too sure what to do with it. I was compiling against glibc 2.19, which seems to be the same used in OpenELEC.

After a bit of playing around, I actually found that if I also included libiconv v1.14 instead of relying on the built-in glibc iconv support, the text now shows up, so that seems to have been the problem

Thanks again for your help! All fixed.