ANNOUNCE: piCorePlayer 7.0.0

Lets keep the Christmas presents coming!

The pCP team is happy to announce the official release of piCorePlayer 7.0.0

Significant changes

pCP 7.0.0

• Kernel 5.4.83
• RPi Firmware Dec 8, 2020
• Includes support for RPi 400, and CM4 modules.
• Based on piCore 12.x base.
• OpenSSL 1.1.1h
• Drivers included for upcoming DAC cards. Allo Boss2, and PiFi40.
• Hardware Random Daemon. Required for some headless installations to allow SSL to work properly. SSH key generation on older pi boards(Zero/B/B+) is still rather slow on first boot. May take up 120-140s on first boot to fully populate.
• mDns enabled by default. Burn your image, boot the RPi, and find it by http://pcp.local This is broadcasting the hostname of your player, so please change your hostname on the tweaks page if you have multiple pCP devices. (mDns can be disabled on the tweaks page too)
• Integration of cifs-utils for better CIFS drive mounting support, including special characters in share passwords. (Not enabled by default)
• You now have the ability to set the amount of time when retrying to mount remote network shares. This should resolve problems where NAS system boot slower than pCP. The network share also no longer disables itself if not found.
• Includes Squeezelite 1.9.8-1287-pCP, which includes the latest ssl handling patches.

Changes since Beta6

• RPi4B 8GB board should boot fine on both 32 bit and 64bit images
• PirateAudio display support is updated and working
• Implemented LMS upgrade branches for upgrade (Release/Stable/Development) Default is the release branch, but is user selectable.

Images

32 Bit: piCorePlayer7.0.0
Supports: All RPi boards

64 Bit: piCorePlayer7.0.0-64Bit
Supports: RPi3B and RPI4B Boards.

Known Issues

• No support for RT kernels. I don't see support for these kernels continuing.
• Merus Amp is not fully integrated yet, please note how to configure the card. https://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...l=1#post993971
• The 64bit kernel does not support the USB Fiq driver that is required on a RPI3B for most proper USB functions. The RPi4B never has required this version of the usb driver.

Notes

• Adding a file named "netusb" to the boot partition will automatically load/configure net-usb kernel modules.
• Adding wpa_supplicant.conf to the boot partition will automatically enable wifi.

Recommended Upgrade path.

• Download new image and configure from scratch.
• Insitu_update is availiable, and handles most installations. However, downgrading versions will not be possible.
• Some packages will be automatically upgraded, as they are known to need updated for pcp7. Some packages like python will not be automatically upgraded. While the old version are no longer available for download, they should continue to work on your current system.

Downloads Can be found: https://docs.picoreplayer.org/downloads/

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Latest WWW interface version. This is updated by running "Patch Update" from the main menu

piCorePlayer version: 7.0.0
www version: 00011 (note screenshot below might not reflect the newest version)

Attachment 30393

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RPI4 Bootloader update Support - This will allow you to update your RPI4 bootloader and VL805 chipset firmware. Needs to be done via ssh. If something goes wrong below, and your RPI4 won't boot, here is a link to the RPI Recovery proceedure. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

The latest Critical firmware from RPI is LATEST: Thu Sep 3 12:11:43 UTC 2020 (1599135103)

open an ssh session
If you would like to load other firmware branches, do this before running rpi-eeprom-update (options are critical, stable or beta)
This this is a flash process if something goes wrong, make sure you are aware of rpi's recovery process.....https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Command output should look similar to this