michael

I created a new image for my Odroid C2 with the most current version of Armbian 5.26. Configuration was pretty much standard, except BOOTSIZE=0 and ROOTFS_TYPE=ext4. The image works fine, if dumped to a sdcard. When dumping it to an emmc card, the system boots up, but 'find / > /dev/null' leads to a filesystem error:
 
[   52.799920] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p1): htree_dirblock_to_tree:913: inode #41001: block 12032: comm find: bad entry in directory: rec_len % 4 != 0 - offset=0(0), inode=8213, rec_len=4097, name_len=0
[   52.812862] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): Remounting filesystem read-only
 
Behavior is deterministic - I tried with two different boards and two different emmc cards. I also checked, that the filesystem is initially ok on the emmc.
 
I tracked the problem down to the Amlogic mmc driver in linux kernel 3.14.y. During kernel boot, the function aml_sd_emmc_execute_tuning in drivers/amlogic/mmc/aml_sd_emmc.c is invoked. pdata->need_cali == 1 and aml_sd_emmc_execute_tuning_index is called. At the end, this function writes to the emmc: mmc_write_internal(mmc->card, record_blk, 1, write_buf).
The first two bytes of the written data are 0x2015, 0x1001 - which perfectly corresponds to the inode and rec_len from the error message above.
The position where the data is written at is calculated in emmc_partitions.c (function get_reserve_partition_off) and depends on several constants. The position evaluates to block #98304, which is somewhere in the root partition of the disk. Since in my image, this block is used by a directory inode, the filesystem gets corrupted.
 
On an image with a 64MB boot partition and an ext4 root partition, the write operation goes to the boot partition. It does not seem to have a negative impact on the consistency of the filesystem - at least not in my case.
 
I could imagine different solutions of the problem:
(1) set OFFSET=64 -> write operation will go to the unused space before boot / root partition
(2) change constants in linux kernel -> write operation will go to a different block on emmc (i cannot guess potential side effects of this)
(3) change partition layout on emmc by changing calculation in debootstrap-ng.sh
 
 
Best regards,
Michael