During booting, the operation of loading LIRC modules fails frequently, so you can see IR operation doesn't work.

Under this situation, the following message comes and there is no input event from IR.

$ irw
connect: Connection refused

It seems lirc is stpped by systemd caused by an unknown reason and it causes abnormal termination of lirc process.

We are trying to fix it and you can use one of the following workarounds until we've done it.

Add sleep count at the following point.

load_modules() of /etc/init.d/lirc

modprobe $mod 2> /dev/null || MODULES_MISSING=true**
sleep 1

$ vi /etc/init.d/lirc
.....
.....
load_modules ()
{
        MODULES_MISSING=false
 
        log_daemon_msg "Loading LIRC modules"
        for mod in $*; do
                if [ $mod = "udev" ]; then
                        log_end_msg 0
                        log_success_msg "Restarted via udev, don't reload modules"
                        break
                else
                        modprobe $mod 2> /dev/null || MODULES_MISSING=true
                        sleep 1
                fi
        done
        log_end_msg $?
 
        if $MODULES_MISSING; then
                log_failure_msg "Unable to load LIRC kernel modules. Verify your"
                log_failure_msg "selected kernel modules in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf"
                START_LIRCMD=false
                START_LIRCD=false
        fi
}

Restart lirc service after booting makes LIRC normal.

root@odroid64:/home/odroid# irw
connect: Connection refused
 
root@odroid64:/home/odroid# service lirc restart
 
root@odroid64:/home/odroid# irw
000000004db2738c 00 KEY_ENTER lircd.conf
000000004db29966 01 KEY_LEFT lircd.conf
000000004db2837c 01 KEY_RIGHT lircd.conf

You can add auto start daemon as following.

- auto execution "service lirc restart"
 
odroid@odroid64:~$ su
root@odroid64:/home/odroid# cd /etc/init.d
root@odroid64:/etc/init.d# vi restartlirc
 
#!/bin/sh
service lirc restart
 
root@odroid64:/etc/init.d# chmod 755 restartlirc
root@odroid64:/etc/init.d# cd ../rcS.d
root@odroid64:/etc/rcS.d# ln -s ../init.d/restartlirc S90restartlirc
root@odroid64:/etc/rcS.d# reboot