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Showing posts from May, 2021

No more boot hangs

The recent kernel patch that fixes the rcu errors/crashes has been applied to U-Boot in Manjaro testing/unstable branches.  https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/packages/core/uboot-pinephone/-/commit/ebdfd9a4124276fdb2d636aaecb861c205b71d69 I have tested this on the 4 phones that randomly hang during boot. All 4 have passed 100 consecutive reboot cycles without hanging. Hopefully this patch makes it into other distributions soon.

No more time travelling

A recent kernel patch fixes the instability that was causing the rcu errors I was having in many of my PinePhone boards . I have tested this patch on all of my boards and the rcu errors have gone away. I can run them at 624MHz DRAM clock and not have any hangs or time jumps. The patch has made it into megous kernel , so any distribution that uses it will get the update.

Damaged SD card socket

I was playing with the microSD card extender from Pine64 . It seems to have damaged the socket . There is a card detect switch built into the socket and it no longer functions. This causes U-Boot to hang if there is a bootable SD card in the socket. It tries to boot from it and then fails the card detection, even though it is running from the card itself. In the serial debug output it shows: Trying to boot from MMC1 MMC: no card present spl: mmc init failed with error: -123 SPL: failed to boot from all boot devices ### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ### Another PinePhone user had the same issue https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13775 To fix the problem I soldered the switch pin on the socket to ground. When a card is inserted it would normally short the pin to ground (T6 is connected to ground). It now thinks there is always a card inserted. It does not seem to cause any problems. I actually soldered the pin to the metal shield since it is connected to ground. If you think ...