djurny

Hi all, If anyone is interested, I have a Helios64 backup battery pack lying around that I did order back in the day, but never got around to installing/using it. (Have a separate UPS.) From my guess this thing is <6 years old, but again, never seen any charge or discharge. PM me when interested. Groetjes, PS Available for pickup in the San Jose, Bay Area, CA (USA) or can send domestically thru USPS.

Hi, If you are having trouble sourcing a proper serial dongle, you could also try to set (or cap) the serial console's baudrate yourself in armbianEnv.txt. Use/replace the following: console=comfort extraargs=console=ttyS2,115200 earlyprintk=ttyS2,115200 This should prevent your bootscript from setting the kernel's serial baudrate to 1M5 and at least give you some kernel logging during booting. Not sure if the login prompt will follow the same baudrate, as `getty` (or one of it's variants) might use different default settings. Groetjes,

Hi, Not an expert here, but some educated guesses would be related to either timing, blocksizes towards the devices. Anything that might change or increase the amount of ATA commands towards the disks would be my bet to look at. You could experiment with enabling/disabling NCQ, reducing read-ahead, increasing chunksizes in case you use [software] RAID, increasing caching by tweaking vm options. Perhaps even the IO schedulers, there might have been some new IO schedulers introduced on the new kernel that show different behavior compared to the older kernel, etc. Groetjes,

Hi, If you want to know which kernel is used for your build, just run: ./compile.sh inventory-boards This will take some time. Open the resulting .csv file, which will contain all combinations possible. Groetjes,

Hi, Did you also make sure that you copy any ata options from your old installation? e.g. For my own Helios64 I have had similar issues and those were resolved by limiting the SATA link speed to 3Gbps: extraargs=libata.force=1:3.0G,2:3.0G,3:3.0G,4:3.0G The internets say that those ATA errors are caused by the the disk not responding to a controller request in time. Mostly it is advised to replace the [S]ATA cables and to make sure contacts are clean and no crosstalk/EMI can occur. A reduction in the ATA link speed also helps, which in my case sure did. Do keep in mind, that if you have regular spinning drives, the most throughput you will get out of your drives will be around 100~140 MB/s, which translates to roughly 1.5 Gb/s. So decreasing the linkspeed will not cause any slowdown, your drive's throughput will remain the performance bottleneck. For my Helios64, I have had some issues with the left-most (or top) disk, as the connectors did not protrude well enough, or had a little too much flex which caused the left-most disk from sometimes not being detected at all. Reseating and pressing on the connector from the rear helped that issue. As the internets mention these errors are the ATA driver complaining about not hearing from the drive(s) in time (or at all), you might want to experiment with a lower CPU frequency, or perhaps not using any of the dynamic freq scaling governors, but sticking to the powersave or performance one. Groetjes,

Hi @zital debian, Some things you could also try: Replace cables - again. I've had similar issues where the NIC of SBC would drop to 10Mbe half duplex, persistently after using different cables. In the end it was all the cables i had lying around that were not of good quality. Replaced the cat "5e" ones with cat 6 and the issues went away. Disable autoneg on your NIC or only advertise 1Gbe. Try a different switch port, switch or router. Check if you have some of those green options on your router/switch enabled, i think it's called EEE. I had some issues with and my Orangepi zero SBCs in combination with those bad cat "5e" ethernet cables. Groetjes,

Hi @alm, You should try with the legacy kernel, 6.6.75. That still has reboot working on my (first gen) Orange pi zero. Grt,

Hi @loeriver, Check your serial console, as sending a serial <BRK> will trigger the Magic Sysrq sequence. For example, using `tio` to connect to a serial console, I can invoke the Magic Sysrq help test with <ctrl>-t + B + <enter>. Perhaps your serial port has it's RX line shorted to ground? Groetjes,

Hi @Werner, Not to pick nits, but 7 is the highest level (lowest priority) you can give a printk() statement. To make them appear however, the loglevel of the printk() needs to be smaller than the loglevel of the console, meaning the [console] loglevel needs to be 7+1: loglevel= [KNL,EARLY] All Kernel Messages with a loglevel **smaller** than the console loglevel will be printed to the console. It can also be changed with klogd or other programs. The loglevels are defined as follows: Also, the following text also steers into the direction of using 8 instead of 7 to show all printk() messages: To change the current console_loglevel simply write the desired level to ``/proc/sys/kernel/printk``. For example, to print all messages to the console:: # echo 8 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk (Taken from https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/core-api/printk-basics.rst.) Grt,

Hi @gyrex, You might want to try without the fstab entry for your root filesystem: UUID=024728b4-7d81-4433-8476-0f98407d1481 / ext4 defaults,noatime,commit=600,errors=remount-ro 0 1 and add the following to your armbianEnv.txt. extraargs=rw The fstab entry for your rootfs is there to remount your rootfs with some options, it is not there to actuall mount it - that's already done by the rootdev/rootfstype in your kernel commandline. or: change the last digit from 1 to 0 in the fstab entry for your rootfs to prohibit fsck during boot. Hopefully that would allow the system to complete it's boot and make room for some live troubleshooting. Thx, Groetjes,

Hi @Carlos Hartmann, Backups of anything are a good thing. So my advise would be to always keep the ISOs you downloaded somewhere 'safe'. Not that safe that you will forget where you stashed it of course (looking at you @djurny...). Groetjes,

Hi @Vodalex, Write down the MAC address of the interface you want to use to wake up the Helios4. ip link show You would need to put the Helios4 in suspend, by either: sudo pm-suspend or: echo 'suspend' | sudo tee /sys/power/state To wake it up, from another system, make sure that wakeonlan is installed. Then: wakeonlan ${HARDWARE_ADDRESS} That should be it. Groetjes,

Hi there, I think what would be next is to try an older image to see if the serial console and hardware itself are still working. If you're interested, I still have a version here locally: Armbian_20.08.10_Helios64_buster_current_5.8.14.img.xz. Groetjes,

Hi there, Some notes from my side, with the image we are now both trying out, I do have some issues every other boot. Seems that the kernel gets stuck at: [ 19.941334] amba ff6d0000.dma-controller: deferred probe pending: (reason unknown) [ 19.942069] amba ff6e0000.dma-controller: deferred probe pending: (reason unknown) [ 19.942765] platform ff1d0000.spi: deferred probe pending: (reason unknown) [ 19.943404] platform ff1e0000.spi: deferred probe pending: (reason unknown) [ 19.944042] platform ff200000.spi: deferred probe pending: (reason unknown) No idea why. This seems to alternate every other boot, so after a reboot this appears to be tolerated, but the next reboot the kernel gets stuck again. And stuck in like magic sysrq stops working. Make sure you have verbosity=8 in your armbianEnv.txt, to make sure some (read: more) output is generated on the console. Groetjes,

Hi, Just to baseline some stuff: The baudrate you use in screen, it's set to 1.500.000 ? Did the serial cable work before? Or is this the first time you use a C-C cable? I know too little about the differences of C-C vs A-C cables, but if this is the first time using the C-C cable, please try to use A-C with some Mac-to-A hub. I can only confirm an A-C cable works here. Are you sure that the connector of the C end at the Helios64 side is making proper contact? In my (and other's case) the actual plug part did not fully pass through the case. I had to cut some of the plastic away of the C side to expose more of the actual connector. This way it fully entered the case and made better contact with the board. Not sure if I'm explaining this well or not, let me know if this is not clear. Is there anything on your Mac side that is trying to automatically mount the card while you are writing the image? Are you sure the entire image was written to the SDcard? e.g. Did you use conv=fsync for dd ? Or a sync before removing the SDcard? (There is no umounting happening as the card could not be mounted you mentioned.) Did you try and sha256 sum the SDcard contents as well? You should be able to do that (slowly) with dd if=/dev/sdcard bs=1 count=$(stat -c '%s' Bookworm_current_minimal) | sha256sum Make sure to remove the card first and reinsert it to avoid dd is reading cache. Grt,