Hi,

I had Armbian based on kernel 4.19 installed on emmc. It was running pretty good for a long time but recently it was automatically upgraded to kernel 5.3.9 and started to restart while booting.

I had collected a log (see attachment),

It looks like it was unable to find root partition and this is most likely caused by issue with axp20x_device_probe.

Is this a known issue? Is there any remedy?

 

minicom.log

42 minutes ago, divis1969 said:

but recently it was automatically upgraded to kernel 5.3.9

 

How is this possible? We haven't put out a kernel upgrade yet. At least not on a stable kernel branch. Nightly or development builds are for testings only and anything can happen there.

 

42 minutes ago, divis1969 said:

Is this a known issue?

 

This board does not have anyone that would acknowledge this issue and since board is also among "not supported" ones upgrades are never tested. Why this board doesn't have attention? Because we already support too many of them. Start with research is your best go. First would be to use our kernel with upstream device tree blob ... which can also be a solution.

55 minutes ago, Igor said:

 

How is this possible? We haven't put out a kernel upgrade yet. At least not on a stable kernel branch. Nightly or development builds are for testings only and anything can happen there.

 

I'm not sure. Perhaps I had enabled this manually, or I had started from dev build a long time ago...  Sudo apt upgrade had upgraded the kernel as well. First time I had just recovered from this by booting from sd card and modifying links at emmc /boot for kernel and dtb and copying initram from sd. This time I've first collected this log.

 

Well, hopefully I will have some time to debug it.

Well, I've built the Armbian and tried to run it from SD.

Unfortunately, it enters boot loop. I've attached the log from console.

I'm not familiar with u-boot, it looks like u-boot is loaded from SD, but all the boot scripts were taken from mmc (I did not remove my previous OS from it).

Note that I've set verbosity to 7 and console to serial in SD's /boot/armbianEnv.txt and the same should still persist in the mmc's /boot/armbianEnv.txt, but there is no logs from kernel boot. Weird...

 

Can I prevent u-boot to read boot scripts from emmc?

minicom-5.3.9.log

1 hour ago, divis1969 said:

I've set verbosity to 7 and console to serial

Your log look like "console=serial" wasn't present, did you verify for some typo ?

Well, I did not find the exact reason why there was no kernel logs. Most likely I've removed SD card from card reader without proper ejecting.

 

I've spent some time creating a suitable development environment (I've found Armbian is not userdeveloper-friendy) and finally was able to figure out the reason of the boot failure.

That is a patch/kernel/sunxi-current/0111-mfd-axp20x-Add-AC-power-supply-cell-for-AXP813.patch which adds a duplicate entry axp20x-ac-power-supply into a cell list of axp20x MFD device.

I've renamed this patch to *.disabled, rebuilt the kernel and it has booted successfully from SD card (did not yet try to install bootloader and system to emmc - I've removed previous one in assumption it affects the boot, actually not).

 

As for the dev env: what is the best practice to modify and re-build a kernel in Armbian build system? The simplest way seems to create a patch and place it somewhere under patch/kernel. That is because build system  cleans the kernel unconditionally.

On 12/1/2019 at 5:31 AM, divis1969 said:

As for the dev env: what is the best practice to modify and re-build a kernel in Armbian build system? The simplest way seems to create a patch and place it somewhere under patch/kernel. That is because build system  cleans the kernel unconditionally.

 

When you plan to modify sources you build with CREATE_PATCHES="yes" and output patch is getting updated on each recompilation. Once you are happy with a resoults you move it from output to userpatches, patches, sent upstream ...

 

Welcome to sent a pull request with removing the patch from the patch set. Thank you!

 

On 12/1/2019 at 5:31 AM, divis1969 said:

I've found Armbian is not userdeveloper-friendy

Armbian builds script was initially designed as a script to compile boot loader, kernel and Debian user space. Everything else was added later to the existing process. Yes, its not perfect, but your suggesting and improvements can make it better. We wouldn't get this far without.