Lime2, U-boot won't start when using dropbear-initramfs

roar · August 11, 2020

Hi everyone,

I am trying to setup a new armbian buster system on a lime2 eMMC board. Not currently using the eMMC. Wanted to have a regular armbian install on the sd card, and then an encrypted root partition on an SSD attached with SATA. I've done this before by loosely following this post

If I setup a system without using dropbear to unlock the root partition and boot, and use a keyboard to enter the password to unlock it instead, that works fine. However, if I install the `dropbear-initramfs` package, copy my ssh keys to /etc/dropbear-initramfs/authorized_keys and then do `update-initramfs -u` the bootloader doesn't seem to get past the initial stages. Here is some of the output from the bootup leading me to believe something went wrong in updating the kernel image and the bootloader on the SD card:

Scanning mmc 0:1...
Found U-Boot script /boot/boot.scr
3789 bytes read in 2 ms (1.0 MiB/s)
## Executing script at 43100000
U-boot loaded from SD
Boot script loaded from mmc
250 bytes read in 2 ms (122.1 KiB/s)
142269496 bytes read in 704 ms (17.3 MiB/s)
7163856 bytes read in 396 ms (17.3 MiB/s)
Found mainline kernel configuration
42254 bytes read in 7 ms (5.0 MiB/s)
5532 bytes read in 5 ms (1.1 MiB/s)
Applying kernel provided DT fixup script (sun7i-a20-fixup.scr)
## Executing script at 44000000
## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 43300000
    Image Name:    uInitrd
    Image Type:    ARM Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed)
    Data Size:    14226432 Bytes = 13.6 MiB
    Load Address:    0000000
    Entry Point:       0000000
    Verifying Checksum ... Bad Data CRC
Ramdisk image is corrupt or invalid
SCRIPT FAILED: continuing...
switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc0 is current device
Scanning mmc 0:1...

A bunch of messages flash by which I couldn't get on camera, and then it hangs with something along the lines of `autload with TFTPGET...`

From what I understand, the ramdisk image is corrupted and u-boot falls back to trying to download it from the network somehow. Is this ramdisk the `boot.scr` file?

The interesting thing is if I downgrade the kernel, by downgrading the packages `linux-image-current-sunxi` and `linux-dtb-current-sunxi` to version 20.05.0-trunk instead of 20.05.3 then I can successfully install `dropbear-initramfs` and unlock the system via ssh.

Does anyone have any ideas of how this can be fixed?

I can provide more info if need be. Like how I setup the encrypted system. Or I can find my serial to usb cable to try and get more output

Thanks

Igor · August 11, 2020

2 hours ago, roar said:

Here is some of the output

roar · August 13, 2020

Right, sorry for not doing this earlier:

http://ix.io/2u26

The logs from the encrypted root system are at the end, there are multiple reboots in between.

- I screwed up the armbianEnv.txt file at one point, and restored it from a fresh armbian image. I will try another fresh install and encrypted root setup to be sure there aren't any other problems

- The CPU temperature seems quite high to me? I remember using the same board a year or more ago and the temps were around 45C instead of 65C. I have a cubietruck that hovers around 45C, seems odd the lime2 emmc would be so much hotter