As I don’t need desktop environment I went with the Ubuntu Server.
I find that image extremely unstable, it freezes from time to time and have to unplug the SBC to reboot it.
And there are some circunstances that make the SBC freeze inmediately like firing speedtest CLI
After that freezes and reboot, I try to find some errors in the logs but there is no indication in the logs that there was an error at all.
Has anybody faced these issues and found a solution??
If not, is the Debian version more stable??
Hi there, I’m having the same trouble with a new Radxa Zero I bought and then set up yesterday.
The first Radxa Zero I bought is not showing this problem. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.
Some notes, but could be complete red herrings at this stage:
hardware differences: I notice my old Radxa Zero (v1.51) has a AW-CM256SM metal chip (next to the USB-C power connector) whereas the new one (also v1.51) has a chip that says AP6256.
software differences: I’m using the same Ubuntu image (I didn’t redownload anything for both), but the new one has been fully updated to the state of yesterday’s apt repositories whereas the old one hasn’t. I’ll report back with kernel versions etc later on if this seems related.
I’m trying the new Radxa Zero on a different power supply to see if that may be related — although the old Radxa Zero seems perfectly happy on this power supply even though it’s running some software and has a USB microphone+speaker plugged in to the user port.
As for the fault:
I was wondering if it was just Wifi shutdown, but I don’t think it is. Not only do SSH connections die, but so do adb shell connections (and adb lists the device as offline once it’s dead: you can’t reconnect).
I have not yet tried to get a serial connection to see if there’s a kernel panic listed or whether it’s still controllable through there (but if both SSH and ADB are broken I would expect not to be able to).
On the serial connection, when the board died I got this line (and this line only):
[ 3558.042771] Kernel panic - not syncing: stack-protector: Kernel stack is corrupted in: __cpufreq_driver_target+0x650/0x6b0
On the other hand, I didn’t only buy one board this time; I have another (with the same chip as the ‘new’ board that is dying) and this one is happy to stay alive for hours.
I have decided to try and reflash the dying board again, ensuring to properly sync after dd and give it time to flush caches, before rebooting it. I will report back on whether this solves my problem.
It crashed against after being reimaged, but I’ve updated to the latest apt repository (same as the working one from the new batch) and will leave it to sit on the new kernel version. Fingers crossed it doesn’t crash again?
Edit: it crashed again. Maybe it’s a defective unit?
Edit2: since I’m collecting crash logs … it crashed again, this time with this in the serial logs:
i have a radxa zero and cannot run ubuntu server focal 20220801 too. it can boot to login screen then automatically reboot. don’t know why. so i have to use armbian- focal instead
It’s interesting to hear that the Armbian image works. However in my case the Armbian image would intermittently not boot (see Radxa Zero intermittently won't boot; is my eMMC faulty?) so I’m a bit reluctant to keep distro hopping until I find an image that doesn’t show either problem.
It might be worth putting this in /etc/modprobe.d/brcmfmac.conf and rebooting: options brcmfmac fcmode=0 roamoff=1
I installed the official Armbian bullseye CLI image on my 1GB Zero, applied the above and then installed OS updates and compiled a Qt application without any problems - would have expected it to have crashed at least once by now.
Afraid I’ve given up on sorting this out and am returning the boards to ALLNET.
The one board I had that I thought wasn’t suffering from this problem had a couple of crashes (just much less frequently). It’s unfortunate but instability is a big big problem for the use cases I bought these boards for.
Hello @brath@skm@reivilibre, I have this issue and this has to do with timings that was on the kernel level. I cannot give any specifics but I have fixed this issue with the help of patches from @steev – thanks!. I have two boards but one of them crashes constantly. I will be uploading the kernel I compiled if you are interested in testing it. If you want to recompile your kernel, here is the patches I applied >
Hi, I bought 6 radxa zero boards with different configurations (ram/emmc). 100% have issues. They did disconnect from wifi and ADB is not working. Made some “force” procedures to make the boards reconnect to wifi after a failure, worked for a while but at the end they crash. It looks like it is more like an image problem. Testing the boards for some hours is not a real example that the boards are stable due to the fact that they crash eventually over time. I have used the official image “radxa-zero-ubuntu-focal-server-arm64-20220801-0346-mbr.img” from this link https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero/releases/tag/20220801-0213, at first glance it works but after a couple of days maybe weeks it crashes.
This is not a normal problem for a production batch. Your boards have excellent characteristics but by now are very unstable. Is there an official image that works with whatever wifi chip you used and that are stable?
We are planning to use a SBC for our company but we can’t rely, by now, in your products. Any help or support will be fully appreciated.
