Odroid N2 with Armbian Bookworm; emmc boot fail

[hjheins]

Hello all,
I am using an Odroid N2 with a 16Gb emmc and Armbian Bookworm. However as this got a bit small, I installed Armbian Bookworm to a new 64Gb emmc (Armbian is installed on an SD and can then be copied/installed to emmc).
This seemed to work fine, and I had a running system.
However, on the 3rd or 4th reboot, I got the error that the file "boot.scr" wasn't readable. With that, the emmc was not bootable anymore.
I reinstalled multiple times, and each time, the emmc would work for a 2-5 boots, but no more. Each time, i got the error as above, or the error as below (partition could not be found)

I never had this issue with the 16Gb emmc?

Does anyone know this behaviour, or better: does anyone know what is causing this and how to solve it?

thanks,

[usual user]

8 hours ago, hjheins said:

Does anyone know this behaviour

Something like this has happened in the past. The firmware is flaky to some eMMC variants. If you search the forum, you will find relevant posts. Some users have used my firmware build and been successful, but I don't think the true cause has really been figured out.

[hjheins]

Hi @usual user,

 

when you say "flaky firmware" do you mean the spi boot/petitboot on teh Odroid N2?

or do you mean flaky on the emmc module?

The module I have is indeed of an older variety, so maybe that could have something to do with it?

How can I find more info on your firmware build please?

 

thanks

[usual user]

1 hour ago, hjheins said:

do you mean the spi boot/petitboot on teh Odroid N2?

The device firmware is the only truly device-specific code that initializes the SoC and loads the OS. In the x86 architecture world, this is called BIOS. It often uses U-Boot as payload, but there are other ones as well. With its proprietary implementation, Petitboot can't even use the most common standard bootflows and will be therefore usually replaced by mainline firmware versions.

 

1 hour ago, hjheins said:

How can I find more info on your firmware build please?

Mainline firmware for ODROID-N2/N2+

[hjheins]

that looks really interesting.

I'll dive into it.

thanks a lot @usual user!

[hjheins]

As a small update:

I did an update of petitboot (apparently I never did that since I owned the N2), and installed Debian bookworm over the petitboot net installer.

This worked and for some reason seems to be rock solid; no issues with loosing or corrupting boot files whatsoever.

I have no clue what is diffent between the Armbian image and the netboot one to make such a big difference in behaviour. (well, I see some differences, but they seem to be minor and not obviously related to the issue at hand)

I' ll keep an eye on this, and see if I can find out more of the reasons behind the differences.

[umiddelb]

X-Ref: 

 

[hjheins]

thank you @umiddelb,

 

That looks definitely similar, but not the same; it might have the same origin though (the firmware).

It seems also the emmc card itself play a role here:

as I mentioned I also have a 16GB emmc with armbian that works flawlessly every time on the same N2 with the same microcode (==the old one from 2019)

The difference between the 2 emmc cards is this:

the working one is orange, the failing one is red:

https://wiki.odroid.com/accessory/emmc/reference_chart

 

I am not even sure why this makes a difference, but apparently it does.

I guess I will get curious enough a couple of days and try if with the updated microcode on the N2, the red one will behave, and can hold it's armbian.

But that day is not today 🙂

 

[umiddelb]

There is an implicit timeout built into uboot which triggers this error messages. I suppose that the newer firmware will circumvent this timeout.