suberimakuri Posted December 29, 2018 Posted December 29, 2018 Hi everyone, Big fan of debian based distro's. Have six Rock64's and looking for a newer kernel (4.9+) with default Ubuntu modules list. 3 have eMMC cards and 3 using the Pine64 USB->SATA adapter with SSD drives. I have powered usb hub, y cables, etc but am using USB2 without powered hub because it's reliable as is and USB3 boot with any distro power injection seems unreliable. Not too concerned about throughput. Ayufan's release bionic-minimal-rock64-0.7.11-1075-arm64.img.xz with 4.4 is very stable on these. However Ayufan's mainline kernels after 4.4 are stripped right back. I spent a couple days compiling kernels with Ayufan's 4.4 module set and variations merged with Ubuntu etc but never got a stable build happening. So I've been trying out Arch Linux and it was stable with 4.18 but not supported by the tools I want to use (kubespray, other ansible playbooks). I went through a converted a bunch of my Ansible stuff to suit both Ubuntu and Arch but kubespray is a beast and decided too much effort (also they don't want to support Arch if do PR which is fair enough - github issue by someone else). This led me to Armbian. I see there are later kernels here: https://apt.armbian.com/pool/main/l/ Before getting to this I put extracted Armbian_5.65_Rock64_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.162.7z (.img) onto one of the SSD's with `dd`. It booted the first time, but wouldn't boot the second time. Re-`dd`ed the image on there. Any `apt upgrade` or just `reboot` would prevent future boots from happening. Tried downgrading to 5.59 without luck. Eventually got it to boot again but not sure what was different, then tried updating kernels and all was fine. Tried dd back to 5.65 and stuck again. Keep getting various crashes even after dd image again. Have tried powered USB for SSD's as well even though not needed with ayufan bionic build. Spoiler Having a go at building new img now with the dev kernel to see if that will boot more reliably. The docs are great, thanks for all the hard work on this, I know the SBC manufacturers don't make it easy to get all these devices going and well supported by mainline. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
TonyMac32 Posted December 30, 2018 Posted December 30, 2018 Mainline has been a bit of a problem for Rockchip and the RK3328, however let me review the dev images/builds as well, and likewise, can you get the UART debug output / armbianmonitor -u output before and (if possible) after upgrade? I increased the drive level used to interface to the SD on the 4.4 kernel, but I don't think I did on the mainline, there could be some corruption happening due to malformed bits getting to the SD card. If the DTS changed to include higher speed modes, it would kill it for sure not to use 8 mA instead of 4. https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-kernel/commit/501b604fcb0b317e82be21183f764bc3e4e1f519
suberimakuri Posted December 30, 2018 Author Posted December 30, 2018 Thanks very much. I'm booting from SSD drive connected with USB2 -> SATA adapter so not sure if that commit would be related. `armbianmonitor -u` is neat. After fresh dev build with 4.19 rc4. It took about 30-40 minutes crash looping on boot for it to stand up.http://ix.io/1x7c 4.4 current default image here: http://ix.io/1x7d If I can get to kernel 4.9 or higher I think I'm fine. I'll look into the Armbian docs and see if I can pin kernel version in the default-config build process and only apply relevant (tbd) patches...
TonyMac32 Posted December 30, 2018 Posted December 30, 2018 Rockchip/Ayufan 4.4 will be the most advanced in terms of support. 4.19 will be the next most advanced. Anything else will be nearly unusable. After the incredibly smooth sailing with the RK3288 in mainline, the RK3328 is *very* disappointing.
suberimakuri Posted December 30, 2018 Author Posted December 30, 2018 Bummer. Was there a few items merged into 4.19? Before posting this I did a quick double check and I see Ayufan has just released 4.20: https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel/releases His 4.20 doesn't boot for me but 4.19 release does and seems reliable across a few boots! Last I looked 4.19 was in RC. I'm going to run with the released 4.19 and see if can get everything standing up. Also it looks like some of the drivers I was after are now built into the kernel instead of as modules too. `xt_set` is missing but I may not use Weave for K8s this time or maybe it's time to retry building again. FWIW a fresh Armbian ./compile.sh built 4.19 rc4 again this morning. I'm not sure if this is correct as it did a checkout of Ayufan mainline kernel. Maybe there is a flag somewhere. `dpkg-deb: building package 'linux-source-4.19.0-rc4-dev-rockchip64' in '/home/vagrant/armbian/.tmp/linux-source-dev-rockchip64_5.68_all.deb'.`
martinayotte Posted December 30, 2018 Posted December 30, 2018 53 minutes ago, suberimakuri said: fresh Armbian ./compile.sh built 4.19 rc4 again this morning. I'm not sure if this is correct as it did a checkout of Ayufan mainline kernel. Armbian relies on Ayufan branch, and his latest 4.19 tag still rc4. He as push a tag 4.20.0 this morning, but Armbian has not switched to it yet. I've done myslef a build by switch Armbian locally to his 4.20.0 tag, but I still have issues, such eMMC seems to be broken compared to 4.19.0-rc4.
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