Armbian 4.5 Jessie - HDMI on Cubietruck not working

[lupus]

Dear all,

 

i just installed a fresh Armbian 4.5 Jessie with Vanilla kernel 4.2.3 on an SD card and booted it on a cubietruck.

I did not receive any HDMI output. This did not change after a kernel update to 4.2.5 via apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and a reboot.

 

However, the same cubietruck works flawlessly with Debian Wheezy (2.6 updated to 4.5) and kernel 3.4.110.

 

I checked the boot.cmd script and looked into cubietruck.bin - the standard settings would appear to identify the correct (HD) display resolution and to enable HDMI by default.

 

Do you have any recommendations ? Is there anyone experiencing the same problem ?

 

With kind regards,

Lupus

 

P.S.: I am using Igors Debian images for two years now and this is the first issue that I have to report. Thank you for providing arbmbian to us Igor !

 

 

 

 

 

[Igor]

HDMI / VGA is auto detected in current U-boot while HDMI is default for kernel.

 

Are you perhaps using UHD or some weird non-standard monitor?

 

Do you have anything connected to USB port?

 

Thanks 

[lupus]

Igor, thank you for your fast reply !

 

In fact I do connect the cubie to an UHD monitor - it works fine with Wheezy and kernel 3.4.110.

(Normally I communicate with cubietruck using SSH, in case of troubles i have to fall back to using a monitor)

 

There is nothing connected at the USB port at the moment. (I will connect a USB keyboard and see if that changes anything)

 

Do you have some hints for me how to enable HDMI output with an UHD monitor ?

 

Thanks,

Lupus.

[Igor]

There is a problem with (simple) frame buffer initialization if your monitor is too large in matter of pixels. I figured out this just recently when I hooked a board to UHD HDMI monitor. Need to look into u-boot code and check how can this be solved.

 

Second issues is that u-boot sometimes breaks booting if you have an USB keyboard inserted or some other strange device. Boot script breaks "on any key pressed", so board doesn't boot.

 

I can only say it's a general bug, not just Armbian's

[onlinespending]

There is a problem with (simple) frame buffer initialization if your monitor is too large in matter of pixels. I figured out this just recently when I hooked a board to UHD HDMI monitor. Need to look into u-boot code and check how can this be solved.

 

Second issues is that u-boot sometimes breaks booting if you have an USB keyboard inserted or some other strange device. Boot script breaks "on any key pressed", so board doesn't boot.

 

I can only say it's a general bug, not just Armbian's

 

 

Just wanted to chime in and mention that I'm seeing the same thing with a Banana Pi (M1) connected to a 4K monitor. Works fine with the legacy kernel.

[neomanic]

I'm seeing the same thing with a UHD monitor connected. The particular error is:

HDMI connected: Error need 32400kB for fb, but only 16384kB is reserved

The 32M is obviously the frame buffer required for 3840x2160x32 bit. 

 

That error messages comes from u-boot/drivers/video/sunxi-display.c, in void *video_hw_init(void) where we have

	if (sunxi_display.fb_size > CONFIG_SUNXI_MAX_FB_SIZE) {
		printf("Error need %dkB for fb, but only %dkB is reserved\n",
		       sunxi_display.fb_size >> 10,
		       CONFIG_SUNXI_MAX_FB_SIZE >> 10);
		return NULL;
	}

And that define comes from u-boot/include/configs/sunxi-common.h

#define CONFIG_SUNXI_MAX_FB_SIZE (16 << 20)

which is the 16M limit. Changing that 20 to 21 should do the trick.

 

I haven't tried this myself as I'm not quite ready to do a full build from scratch.

[Igor]

This suppress error regarding memory reservation but there is no picture on the screen.

HDMI connected: Setting up a 3840x2160 hdmi console (overscan 0x0)

I guess 2160p mode is not defined.