Clusterboard startup issues

[PigLover]

Received my new clusterboard and OS-Pines today and have a few issues.

Mounting screw holes too small.  Since the board is MiniITX the mounting holes should be M3 (per the ATX spec), but they are much smaller.  The mounting screws on common MiniITX cases won't fit without modifying the holes.

SO-Pines won't reboot.  Already reported by @PeterKeuning.  On software reboot the SO-Pine powers down but does not restart.  At least most of the time...sometimes, randomly, it seems to work.

Power-on behavior is very inconsistent.  With less than 7 sockets populated everything seems to work consistently.  But with all 7 plugged in one or more modules does not start up.  The yellow NIC activity light on the "inactive" node does not flash and the green LED is also dark.  Also - when this happens - at least one of the other nodes has the green "heartbeet" LED on solid, though that module otherwise seems to be fine.

Clusterboard is powered from the on-board barrel jack using the "official" power brick.  I've moved the SO-Pine's around on the board to see if one of them is responsible, but it doesn't seem to follow any one module.  Software is Ayufun's xenial-minimal-sopine-bspkernel-0.7.19-118.

Also, any leads on a good working minimal Linux with mainline (or at least 4.4.x) kernel would be appreciated.  Looking for one that can be installed without having to hack the kernel modules to get network working (no need for video).

[aww]

Also, any leads on a good working minimal Linux with mainline (or at least 4.4.x) kernel would be appreciated.  Looking for one that can be installed without having to hack the kernel modules to get network working (no need for video).

I should of clarified when I posted this but this is minimal armbian with mainline kernel that has a fix so that networking works on the clusterboard. 

https://storage.googleapis.com/pine64-im....20.img.xz

Be very careful and do not upgrade the linux package with dtb changes. That will undo the changes. I was off on vacation but when I have some free time I will try and see if I can get this into the upstream package.

[PigLover]

Also, any leads on a good working minimal Linux with mainline (or at least 4.4.x) kernel would be appreciated.  Looking for one that can be installed without having to hack the kernel modules to get network working (no need for video).

I should of clarified when I posted this but this is minimal armbian with mainline kernel that has a fix so that networking works on the clusterboard. 

https://storage.googleapis.com/pine64-im....20.img.xz

Be very careful and do not upgrade the linux package with dtb changes. That will undo the changes. I was off on vacation but when I have some free time I will try and see if I can get this into the upstream package.

@aww - thank you very much.  Your image works much better on the so-pine and appears to have cured the issues with the nodes not always starting on powering the clusterboard as well as not rebooting properly.  I appreciate the work you put into this.

Do you perhaps know the specific packages that need to be held in apt in order to prevent overwriting the fix?  I would like to upgrade the rest of the packages before I go much further and need to be able to do additional upgrades later.  Appreciate any guidance.

[hexalyn]

If I am not mistaken the packages you should not update are : linux-image-dev-sun50iw1, linux-headers-dev-sun50iw1 and linux-dtb-dev-sun50iw1

I have gotten the info from : https://www.armbian.com/kernel/ in the section "Mainline and development kernels" for the "Allwinner A64 (sun50iw1)" which is the one in the so-pine modules.

The version in the Aww armbian build is 4.14.20 and the one in the armbian repo is 4.14.18 so it should not hurt not to update these anyway.

[PigLover]

@hexalyn - thanks. I'll freeze those packages and do and update on one node to be sure it doesn't break. If all is well then its off to Kubernetes happy-land!

[PigLover]

With @aww's Armbian minimal build things are looking much better. Very stable. Got docker and K8s loaded, no apps/services yet. But looking good.

I've noticed that the SoC temperature monitoring does not seem to be working. Reading the standard location (/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp) I'm getting strange readings (e.g., -15125).

Any ideas?

[omgwtfskwerlz]

Regarding the mounting holes, I've found that the M3 screws I have work without problem.  Taking a micrometer to them they were about 2.9mm, so I think within normal tolerances.  1/8" rod will not fit.

Looking at a couple examples for the standard, they showed .156" and .16" - almost 4mm.  I wonder if this is to accommodate #6 or M4 screws.  For what it's worth, I've noticed the older orange pi boards used the 3mm mounting holes, whereas on the orange pi one+ they're closer to 4mm.

[aww]

With @aww's Armbian minimal build things are looking much better.  Very stable. Got docker and K8s loaded, no apps/services yet.  But looking good.

I've noticed that the SoC temperature monitoring does not seem to be working.  Reading the standard location (/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp) I'm getting strange readings (e.g., -15125).

Any ideas?

I know that it there is some upstream thermal work going on, I can try and rebuild from the latest kernel. No idea if it's related.


Edit: linux-dtb-dev-sun50iw1 is the only one I think you need to hold back, it's just a one line config change and doesn't add or remove any other code.