Hello,

 

Earlier on this week I decided to upgrade the kernel and the DTBs on my Armbian cluster (quite a few different boards but all of them based on Allwinner A20) from buster-next-5.92 to buster-current-20.08.2. Having successfully completed the upgrade on several other servers, I moved on to the lime2 one - which promptly failed to come back up after the reboot. Connecting the serial console shows u-boot doing its thing without issues and the kernel beginning to boot, producing normal messages - only to suddenly freeze. When exactly the freeze occurs varies, sometimes it even happens halfway through outputting a message line - but it is definitely before the handover to init and I think it's also before initramfs kicks in.

 

Having poked around a bit, I have narrowed the problem down to the DTB update. If I have /boot/dtb point to dtb-4.19.62-sunxi, the system comes up fine - even with the new kernel. On the other hand, as soon as I symlink it back to dtb-5.8.6-sunxi the kernel hangs. BTW. I do not use any overlays and apart from the verbosity increase I do not think I have changed anything in armbianEnv.txt since system installation. In fact, let me just post it here:

 

verbosity=7
logo=disabled
console=both
disp_mode=1920x1080p60
overlay_prefix=sun7i-a20
rootdev=UUID=REDACTED
rootfstype=ext4
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

 

Any ideas how I can debug this further? If you need any more information, let me know.

 

 

Edited September 23, 20206 yr by Marecki

So basically you could track it down to an issue with the newer dtb. Would you mind to throw both through dtc to get the dts and upload both here  or even do a quick comparison on your own?

3 hours ago, Marecki said:

Any ideas how I can debug this further?

Did you update boot loader?

On 9/11/2020 at 7:11 PM, Igor said:

Did you update boot loader?

I was going to say that I had - I did update the u-boot package - but then I realised that the version number I saw on the serial console was not the same as that in the package description. Long story short, I forgot to actually write the u-boot image to the system disc on ALL the machines I have just switched to current... Interesting that it's only been the lime2 which failed to boot under those circumstances. Anyway, one quick dd session later and everything looks in order again.

 

Thanks for having pointed me in the right direction!