Odroid C4

[mboehmer]

Anyone had problems with "apt update / apt upgrade"? Today I updated the packets on my C4, and for some reasons the system didn't boot anymore.

I will try to reproduce with a freshly etched eMMC tonight.

[Curmudgeon]

1 hour ago, mboehmer said:

Anyone had problems with "apt update / apt upgrade"? Today I updated the packets on my C4, and for some reasons the system didn't boot anymore.

I will try to reproduce with a freshly etched eMMC tonight.

Maybe same problem with my Odroid-N2.  Blue LED is on and not blinking.  Upgraded to kernel 5.9.10 this morning.  Curiously, there is a zero length file in /boot named .next that may have diagnostic significance.
 

Added later:  Another anomaly - in /boot there is a symbolic link uInitrd -> uInitrd-5.9.6-meson64 but the target file does not exist.
 

Edited November 28, 2020 by Curmudgeon
Additional information

[Igor]

1 hour ago, Curmudgeon said:

Curiously, there is a zero length file in /boot named .next that may have diagnostic significance.

That's not a problem. We used to use this file in the past. 

Did you power cycle your board. Or just reboot?

[mboehmer]

After "apt update" I made a normal reboot. That was already end of game. Power cycle followed afterwards, with no change in behaviour.

 

I set up now a new eMMC with normal Focal system (no desktop), and excluded the following files from upgrade:

linux-dtb-current-meson64/focal 20.11 arm64 [upgradable from: 20.08.22]
linux-focal-root-current-odroidc4/focal 20.11 arm64 [upgradable from: 20.08.22]
linux-image-current-meson64/focal 20.11 arm64 [upgradable from: 20.08.22]
linux-u-boot-odroidc4-current/focal 20.11 arm64 [upgradable from: 20.08.22]

One of them (or the way it is updated) should be the culprit.

[jimt]

Mine rebooted successfully after update, but the Ethernet is still broken... so I am using a USB Ethernet adapter.

[Igor]

59 minutes ago, mboehmer said:

One of them (or the way it is updated) should be the culprit.

I think boot script could be the problem - if its set for upgrade by any chance. Also u-boot was moved to mainline with last update.

 

My C4 running latest nightly builds - performs good: http://ix.io/2FUT

[acwell]

My C4 has been working well with the latest updates, including reboots with a SD card inserted. I also updated the bootloader via armbian-config, since recent release notes suggested this was needed. May be worth doing that if you are having issues.

 

One of the updates did change the MAC address - a recent uboot update makes the fused MAC address used by default (which is good), which in my case meant the IP address changed. Ethernet still working fine, though.

[Arpel]

Hi, I just did an update (apt update / apt upgrade / bootloader via armbian-config) while being on eMMC and it seems to boot back fine but the Ethernet link is down.

 

The board is usually used headless and when connected to an HDMI screen I can see the boot sequence up to the login prompt, the only things that do not show as "OK" are some network mounts (wired in fstab).

The board is not being given an IP by the router too.

 

Do you have anything in mind that I might try ?

 

Edit : I'm on Buster beta channel, the version installed (and working fine) was 5.8 (20.11.trunk19) and the new one was 21.02.trunk12. 

I also did a couple of hard reboots that did not help.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Arpel
More info

[Igor]

28 minutes ago, Arpel said:

I'm on Buster beta channel, the version installed (and working fine) was 5.8 (20.11.trunk19) and the new one was 21.02.trunk12.

My test C4 works fine. https://users.armbian.com/igorp/latest.html

Can you perhaps try latest beta image?

 

Does power cycle helps?

[Arpel]

Thanks for the quick reply, from your standpoint to which extent would it be different from the latest packages status (all upgraded today at once).

 

On top of that I was hoping to save my current setup as some "important" are in ...

[Igor]

31 minutes ago, Arpel said:

Thanks for the quick reply, from your standpoint to which extent would it be different from the latest packages status (all upgraded today at once).

It depends how long back is your original image. I can't give you warranty for a good upgrade path from some beta preview images. We changed boot loader and boot scripting completely. It should upgrade both ... 

 

31 minutes ago, Arpel said:

On top of that I was hoping to save my current setup as some "important" are in ...

 

Its always possible to save the system https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Recovery/ unless fatal media damages occur - which is an extreme rare, near to impossible event. To be safe, backup of the important is always recommended. Community developed sw comes with no warranty of whatsoever ...

[Arpel]

Of course I'm not claiming any warranty here.

 

I installed one of the first images for the C4 (back to beginning of the year I think) and never upgraded differently than with apt.

 

What is the boot sequence on the C4 ? Would it be possible to install a newer image on a sd-card and use it as a mean to save the needed files (from eMMC) ?

[Igor]

15 minutes ago, Arpel said:

I installed one of the first images for the C4 (back to beginning of the year I think) and never upgraded differently than with apt.

Which probably still had stock bootloader on FAT boot partition. Its amazing that it boots  

 

15 minutes ago, Arpel said:

What is the boot sequence on the C4

 

With Armbian its standardised / similar to other boards.

BL1 loads u-boot which loads boot.scr which loads armbianEnv.txt (here UUID is added and some USB quirks), loads device tree, ramdisk and kernel. Then it boots kernel ...

 

15 minutes ago, Arpel said:

Would it be possible to install a newer image on a sd-card and use it as a mean to save the needed files (from eMMC) ?

Not sure.

[Arpel]

29 minutes ago, Igor said:

 

Not sure.

Looks like eMMC has higher boot priority : I'll unmount the eMMC and use an external reader to save my files. 

 

I'll let you know if the subsequent full install is working fine.

[jimt]

I ended up doing a backup and installing the Armbian Focal mainline kernel 5.9.y image and the onboard Ethernet is working again.  The versions of the linux-* and armbian-config packages claim to be the same. Something else apparently hadn't survived one of the updates about 1.5 months ago.

 

As Arpel mentioned, it seems the C4 always wants to boot from the eMMC, even if there is a bootable SD card is present. Is there a way to change that boot order?

 

[Igor]

20 minutes ago, jimt said:

As Arpel mentioned, it seems the C4 always wants to boot from the eMMC, even if there is a bootable SD card is present. Is there a way to change that boot order?

eMMC has higher priority by (Amlogic chip) design. In some cases / boards they have buttons or pads on the PCB that disabled eMMC temporally so you can force boot from SD. 

[Dual-O]

Hello, is the Odroid Hifi-Shield 2 supported?

[linuxfan]

Is support for ODROID-C4 discontinued? I was checking the website to see if there's new ARMBIAN images for the C4 only to realize the device has disappeared from the list. And this link says "No official support (CSC)": https://www.armbian.com/odroid-c4/. I don't know what "CSC" means. This came out of a sudden to me. If the C4 has been abandoned, what distro would you recommend to use now?

 

Edit: The forum inserted clickable links in my post, so I know see what CSC means: community-supported chip.

[Igor]

2 hours ago, linuxfan said:

If the C4 has been abandoned, what distro would you recommend to use now?

I wouldn't say we have abandoned anything - support was equalized with the level of all other distros. If you have a problem with a hardware related feature, where is our biggest added value and expense, it's now a vendor / your problem and expense. This is the same how other distros "supports" your board. This can be changed ...

 

Armbian OS has very little issues, which we can easily sort out.

[jimt]

9 hours ago, linuxfan said:

If the C4 has been abandoned, what distro would you recommend to use now?

 

I moved to the Manjaro ARM distribution for my C4s.  Obviously, a different package manager/ecosystem and it has only been a week... but so far so good.

[Igor]

6 hours ago, jimt said:

but so far so good.

Manjaro can certainly last more then a week. It is not that bad when nobody is taking care for support.

[mboehmer]

I just came across a bug on C4 SPI - it trashes any transfer with 16++ bytes by overwriting the last received byte in the RX buffer by 0x00.

Does it make sense at all to file a bug?

Bug can be reproduced by simple means on the board I think (using a MOSI-MISO jumper).

I can provide source code of "broken" SPI call, and logic analyzer shots if needed.

Greetings, Michael

[rvalle]

Hi! Just testing the HC4.

 

I have disabled petit boot as explained in the documentation. Boot, works, except with a "reboot" command, the board enters in a boot loop. Any idea why?

[rvalle]

21 minutes ago, rvalle said:

I have disabled petit boot as explained in the documentation. Boot, works, except with a "reboot" command, the board enters in a boot loop. Any idea why?

OK, It worked after using armbian-config to flash bootloader to SPI. (also did to mmc card, but did not make any difference)

[meadrocks]

On 1/17/2022 at 5:08 PM, jimt said:

 

I moved to the Manjaro ARM distribution for my C4s.  Obviously, a different package manager/ecosystem and it has only been a week... but so far so good.

How well does it run? is the GUI responsive? Any tricks to get it to boot?

 

Thanks for any help / tips.