Hi,
First of all, thank You for your work.
On a project we are using Nanopi Neo Air boards with an Allwinner h3 processor and a 8GB eMMC flashed with an Armbian OS:
$ uname -a
Linux <DEVICE_HOSTNAME> 6.6.75-legacy-sunxi #1 SMP Sat Feb 1 17:37:57 UTC 2025 armv7l GNU/Linux
$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release: 11
Codename: bullseye
Recently we have been getting increasing reports of the boards being stuck on boot, on message 'Starting Kernel ...' (checked from logs available on COM port).
Although this behavior is highly undesirable, since the eMMC is visible in device tree when booting from an SD-Card, it can be recovered by running command
$ fsck /dev/mmcblk2p1
In order to reproduce this behavior we have set up a continuous power cycle test where, booting from eMMC:
Device is powered on
After 70 seconds (enough time for the system to boot), power supply is interrupted
Device remains powered off for 10 seconds
This would account for around 1000 power cycles per day and we were able to get the device bricked in the range of 68 to 5500 power cycles.
We then repeated the test but by booting from an SD-Card and were not able to reproduce the issue, having reached power cycle counts of 34381.
Does anyone have a clue on why the eMMC displays this behavior, or is someone able to provide some guidance on what we could do/check to try to prevent this from happening (or making the eMMC more resilient to power cycles)?
