RockPi E reboot hangs

[FabulousGee]

Hey guys,

 

we are facing an issue we can not resolve ourselves so we are looking for some help on here... Our Rock Pi E does not restart successfully occasionally.

Running the Rock Pi E with latest official Armbian with a USB soundcard attached. We are capturing audio and distribute the captured audio via "(c)VLC" via network. Since a few months we are facing reboot issues which are persistent but not easily reproducible. Whenever we reboot manually, everything works fine. When rebooting via cron it does often not reboot and get into a freeze state which makes it impossible to connect via SSH nor serial-adapter.

We already tried switching the power source (suspecting a lack of power), adding a powered USB hub in-between and renewing the USB soundcard to eliminate any defects. We also switched SD card and now even switched to eMMC completely.

Also we had in mind that this could be a heat issue, so we installed heatsinks and even a little fan.

 

I am not 100% sure if this is the only issue since we had some hickups with cvlc, too, which stopped audio streaming suddenly when running for a long time. We had the setup untouched running for a few months, then it started to crash every other week, then like every other day. This is when we came up with a daily reboot to gain some time inspecting what the issue could be.

 

armbian -u: https://paste.armbian.com/umekijamum

Output on serial right before it freezes: https://paste.armbian.com/sicesorulu.sql

 

Any ideas?

Is there a way to detect any RAM faults or faults in the underlying Armbian/Kernel  that occured on some unintended reset/power failure?

We did not re-install Armbian yet since this is quite a bit work to get it all done again.

[jock]

It seems that your board is freezing after DDR initialization and before miniloader boot.

It could be an issue with the DRAM or an issue with flash memory, but since you said you swapped the sdcard and moved to eMMC, probably the problem may somewhere in the DRAM.

 

I'm more prone to suspect some power issue or interference issues though. I see from your dmesg that you have a faulty USB device attached: USB device could easily cause the board to misbehave, either by direct effect (faulty or shortcircuited USB device) or indirectly (interference coming from external equipment attached to the USB device).

 

I have seen once a faulty USB stick that was preventing a Raspberry Pi to boot at all; removing the stick allowed the board to boot fine.

 

 

[FabulousGee]

Thanks for your response. After several tries I came to the conclusion that the used USB hub seems to be faulty. RPi-e is running fine since I changed that. I hope this was all it takes 🙂