Hi All, thanks for this great project, much appreciated!

 

Could someone give me an educated guess whether there is a risk of damaging my board when the blue LED is flashing much faster (at least twice, probably more) than usual? I suspect something is changing the frequency or voltage and I'm not sure how much time I can take in this state to try to analyze the problem further. For now I unplug the power when it happens.

I'm trying to netboot my Rock Pi 4B v1.4 with the current or dev branches of buster minimal nfsboot, with no local storage at all (just the SPI flash for u-boot). The legacy 4.4 hangs at very early boot (couldn't get clock / Failed to get pclk) so I gave up on that, but it does work fine when running from an SD card.

 

With the vanilla rootfs.tgz for 5.4.y/5.5.y extracted on the NFS server the boot process waits for 90 seconds trying to mount a device by UUID on /boot. Then I get the maintenance prompt where I can login with the default root password and all is relatively fine and working.

 

I commented out the offending line in /etc/fstab. Now when I reboot, the board seems to hang somewhere in the boot process (I see the mount of root on the NFS server logs, the last messages on the monitor are "Started Serial Getty on ttyS2." and "Started Getty on tty1."; the last messages on the serial console are "[   55.471075] systemd[1]: Reached target Swap." and "[   55.471789] random: systemd: uninitialized urandom read (16 bytes read)") and then the frequency of the blue LED slowly (over the course of 10-15 seconds or so?) increases to at least twice as fast. Any ideas what causes this and what it means?

Thanks,
Arjan

I solved my issue! I isolated it to the set_fixed_mac call in the armbian-firstrun service, specifically after the "nmcli connection down <uuid>" call.

 

I use ip=dhcp in my kernel command line and at this point the root filesystem is mounted over the active ethernet connection. I don't really understand the purpose of set_fixed_mac, but bringing the connection down is not going to work with nfsroot. I've commented out that set_fixed_mac call and now everything seems to work. Happy days!

I slightly modified the title as I think the lights flashing were a symptom, not the main point of the thread. I also marked it [solved].

 

Thanks for reporting back the solution. This may help someone else in the future.

 

EDIT: This sounds like it may be general enough to move to Common Issues. But I am not certain so I leave it here in RK3399 sub-forum for now. If someone else later finds this method to work on other hardware / chipset, please add your feedback and I will move it to Common Issues sub-forum. Thanks.

Edited February 10, 20206 yr by TRS-80
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