Apt Upgrade causes Rock Pi S not to boot [Armbian 24.11.1]

[Truenox]

Hi everyone,
 

I've been working with Armbian for a while on my Rock Pi S, I got to a stable situation on version 24.11.1 with kernel 6.6.63 where everything worked perfectly... but recently this last week I applied an apt upgrade, which applied strong base modifications (linux-current-rockchip64 and dtbo going from 24.11.1 to 24.11.3), after applying this update and rebooting, I can't get it to boot again, either from the Micro SD or from the eMMC installation.

I wanted to report this bug, but I don't have a TTL cable at hand to be able to do the corresponding debugging...

I've tried to flash older versions, or even flash the 24.11.1 version again but I need the audio fix for kernel 6.6.63, which doesn't apply after the last upgrade coincidentally.

For work reasons I need to get this SBC up and running...

Any solution for this?

Thanks for all.

Edited yesterday at 02:58 AM by Truenox

[brentr]

Sorry to hear this.  I should have time to look into next week.

Are you using Debian or Ubuntu?

Exactly which image did you start from?

(Can you provide a link to the image?)

 

Did you try a fresh install of the latest stable image?

 

[Truenox]

Hello brentr,

 

I downloaded the image from the official website, right from Rock Pi S:

 

https://www.armbian.com/rockpi-s/

 

Initially and in the most stable version possible I had the noble server CLI version installed, but as it failed and I couldn't get it to boot again, I performed clean installations of both systems, both Debian Bookworm and Ubuntu Noble and in both cases the same failure occurs, after performing an apt upgrade from a clean installation and executing a reboot, it bricks and doesn't boot.

 

From the desperation of these days... I even tried Trixie and Oracular thinking that a more recent version could solve the problem, and directly these images don't work, they didn't boot either.

 

Thinking it might be a problem with the recent u-boot tool updates, I repeated this whole process, installing it on the eMMC, with the same result.

 

The feeling is that some base package has been touched, corrupting the installation. I'd like to provide the logs for further help, but as I mentioned, I don't have a TTL serial cable handy to debug, so I'll have to have one.

 

So I found myself in a loop with no way out, so I appreciate the quick response to solve this problem.

 

Thanks.

[SamHae]

I ran into the same problem today w/ Bookworm 😕

Edited 13 hours ago by SamHae

[brentr]

Please confirm...

to duplicate this one just needs to:

 

Flash 

https://dl.armbian.com/rockpi-s/Noble_current_server

to an SDcard.

Then, run 

apt update

apt upgrade

 

and, subsequent reboot will fail.

Correct?

 

One strange thing here is that the description of these images on https://www.armbian.com/rockpi-s/  say they run the 6.6.62 kernel, but @Truenox claimed to be running 6.63.

 

[brentr]

What hardware version of the Rock PI-S board do you have?

(I have v1.3)

[Truenox]

Hello @brentr,

Exactly, the steps are as follows:

1. Flash 

https://dl.armbian.com/rockpi-s/Noble_current_server or https://dl.armbian.com/rockpi-s/Bookworm_current_minimal (Fails in both) to an SDcard.

2. Then, run 

3. apt update

4. apt upgrade
5. and, subsequent reboot will fail.

My board is v1.3 with the rockchip RK3308B (Recently purchased).

What I told you about Kernel 6.6.63 is all written in this forum post: 

You mentioned a kernel fix for audio since if you install kernel 6.6.62 it does not detect any audio card.

Thanks.

[Truenox]

As a revealing fact, the packages that it updates are the following:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libtext-iconv-perl
The following packages will be upgraded:
 armbian-config armbian-firmware base-files bsdextrautils bsdutils fdisk libblkid1 libfdisk1 libglib2.0-0 libmount1 libpam-systemd libpython3.11-minimal libpython3.11-stdlib libsmartcols1 libsystemd-shared libsystemd0 libudev1
 libuuid1 linux-dtb-current-rockchip64 linux-image-current-rockchip64 mount openssh-client openssh-server openssh-sftp-server python3-pkg-resources python3.11 python3.11-minimal rsync systemd systemd-resolved systemd-sysv
 systemd-timesyncd tzdata ucf udev util-linux util-linux-extra
37 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.