Hi everyone,
I have a problem with my Cubietruck that I was able to partly debug now, but I really like to have input from those who know more about this setup.
On my Cubietruck (trusty, kernel 4.6.5-sunxi), I have a 120GB SSD (no-name brand) and added an ext4 partition and corresponding fstab line to mount it.
Booting and mounting this partition works well when I cold start my system, and had powered it off before for a while.
But when I do a warm start (sudo reboot), the system hangs on boot, quite reliably (it seems to occasionally work, though).
I changed my kernel command line and added 'init=/bin/sh', started a 2nd bash terminal before replacing the bash with upstart and tried to figure out where upstart got hung up with 'initctl list'.
It looks like it got stuck waiting for a mountall which waited for something.
[sidenote: It would be great if upstart would log which process it is waiting on when that process takes more than a given amount of time, and mountall shouldn't hang (seemingly indefinitely) in this situation. I might file bugs with those packages as soon as I have understood the whole problem. Took me quite a while to figure this out.]
What I found was that my '/dev/sda*' devices/partitions are missing!
Additionally, my kernel log has this entry:
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Compared to the successful system boots, there the usual messages that the kernel detected my SATA drive are missing as well.
My system is quite customized by now, so I was quite sure what was causing this hang (and I only noticed it after lots of customization). Removing the fstab mount entry makes it come up reliably now, though.
I found this and wonder whether it is related. All my packages should include the fixes, though?
Is this a problem with my SSD warm-starting? Might this be an initialization issue in the SATA driver? Is there a good way to work around this problem? Is this a known problem?
Thanks a lot in advance!
EDIT: This seems to be SSD specific. The built-in SSD delivered with the Cubietruck shows the above behavior, whereas an old Intel 'SSD 320 Series 40GB' comes up fine and without any problem, also after every warm start.
I still like to know whether there is a way to work around this issue. ('echo "- - -" > .../scan' doesn't do anything, link is still reported as down after that).
Any clues or ideas?