I just reinstalled my Cubietruck with the Debian jessie, image from http://mirror.igorpecovnik.com/Cubietruck_Debian_4.1_jessie_3.4.108.zip. Only one core is available.  What could I do so that the two cores are detected?

 

For what it's worth, the bootloader briefly displays a "checksum error" message.  Could it be that I'm still using the old bootloader from the previous installation?  (It was Debian wheezy in summer 2014.)

 

Thanks in advance for advice.

 

Yes, this problem is typical for using wrong boot loader.

Thanks, Igor, for the hint.  The bootloader prints its version as "U-Boot 2015.07-dirty (Aug 05 2015 - 09:17:32 +0200) Allwinner Technology".  Moreover, the bootloader part of the SDcard compares equal to the u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin file from your Debian jessie image:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1k skip=8 | cmp - /usr/lib/linux-u-boot-cubietruck_4.1_armhf/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
End of file on /usr/lib/...

 

So, is this the wrong bootloader?  Which other bootloader could I try?

It looks ok but the problem is in uboot configuration. I use the same uboot source for old (3.4.) and new (4.x) kernel. The only difference is configuration but you can boot even if you forgot to set those extra parameters. The only downside / bug is that you only got one core.

 

This is the first time I used boot loader 2015.07 and I made many changes in the build process so the problem can also be on my side.

 

Use one version back where the boot loader is 2015.04 or gimme few days to double check. I think I haven't packed u-boot properly.

I installed http://mirror.igorpecovnik.com/Cubietruck_Debian_4.0_jessie_3.4.108.zip, which looks like the version before the current one, and has U-Boot 2015.04.  The two cores are detected!

 

root@cubietruck:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor    : ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
processor    : 0
BogoMIPS    : 957.05

processor    : 1
BogoMIPS    : 830.00
 

Thanks for your help, Igor.