~No HDMI or Ethernet~ Crashes since flashing

#1

Had my Rock5b working quite well for a couple of months before deciding to see if I could get it booting from NVMe. Big mistake.

Initially I flashed it from a running system via /dev/mtdblock0. After failing to get it to boot from NVMe after a couple of attempts I have a feeling I might have flashed (presumably the first 16MB of a) Debian SD image to it. Following this I wasn’t getting any HDMI output and it wouldn’t come up on the network, though depending on the inserted SD card the LEDs would appear to go through the normal boot sequence or just go into a boot-poweroff loop. But no worry - it’s unbrickable right? Just need to get into this maskrom mode people talk about…

After a couple of weeks of fiddling and finding a cable/port/power combination that would allow me to perform an apparently-successful spi flash (NVMe “armbian” image) via rkdeveloptool, it was still doing the same thing, no HDMI output or coming up on the network. Now having a USB/TTL uart, I looked at the serial console and discovered that it is booting “perfectly” from the NVMe (this, I think, is the rock-5b_debian_bullseye_cli_2023-01-03T0407+0000_gpt.img.xz image at this point), albeit still with no HDMI output and the kernel doesn’t appear to be finding the ethernet controller.

The r8125 module is loaded however, and dmesg shows the normal complaints about it tainting the kernel. But there are no lines suggesting detection of a device. dmesg | grep -i eth shows nothing of interest.

lspci -vv shows the RTL8125 all present and correct: https://gist.github.com/risicle/af585dba5d0cc93a08ecf97fbd2dafbc, but ip link only ever shows the loopback interface. Could it be missing some firmware?

I use this as a headless build-machine, so the HDMI isn’t my major issue (though it would be nicer to be able to use it instead of the serial console), but not having ethernet is a big problem.

I’ve tried this with both a 20W PD PSU (which ran the board fine for its first couple of months) and with 20V over a barrel jack adapter. Same results.

Any ideas?

#2

Update on this: I’ve got this “working” with an USB ethernet adapter now. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs, but it’s marginally better than having a brick.

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#3

Scratch that, the board now hangs (blue light) when compiling certain packages.

#4

well buy a proper power supply and read in the meantime the several guides how the board work. and how to compile a distro .

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#5

Did you even read my post?

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#6

Here’s a serial console dump from when I experience a hang: https://gist.github.com/risicle/01c592353827f0fe5f99e8cb694f9d2e (I think there’s more preceding it but that’s all I could catch)

This was once updated to kernel 5.10.110-1-rockchip #ebb43e636, root on NVMe.

#7

Maybe you should have started with buying ttl cable? And use it to capture logs?

Since what you posted is all about kernel going wild. So try:
Latest Armbian
Latest Ubuntu
Ubuntu with older kernel
Also, no hdmi output on all hdmi ports?

#8

One thing I discovered is that recent radxa debian images are configured to use the old apt repository and I was running a fairly old kernel. Switching to the new one (5.10.110-37-rockchip-g74457be0716d) at least got my onboard ethernet back, however I’m still experiencing the kernel panics. At least I captured a better console output of the panic:

#9

Can someone who finds a solution to this pin it on the forum? This same question arises every day.

#10

Which of the several issues discussed here are you referring to?

#11

Here are just a few links to the HDMI issue and the Radxa repository:





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#12

I have been using 5.10.xx builds and have had hdmi problems, but No ethernet issues. Are you using 6.x builds? I have seen ethernet problems there.

#13

To clarify, my ethernet issues were solved once I discovered the debian image defaulted to referencing the old apt repo (https://radxa-repo.github.io/apt/ -based rather than https://radxa.github.io/apt/ -based) and I was therefore using an old kernel. My problem now is the kernel panics (Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference / page dumped because: bad pte). I haven’t tried the HDMI output lately - this would normally be a headless machine for me.

#14

Ahh, yes, lately I have been running the Armbian builds which can be found here https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/ .

Normally I build my own Armbian image using the build tool, but there are also ready-built images available for download.

I have not tried the radxa bulds for the last month or so, but recognize the apt get problem you refer to. I did not try this new repo that you mention.