Nodes not booting

[User 18962]

Im running into an issue where i added a 128gb EMMC to my clusterboard and now my nodes wont boot.

removing the emmc makes no change and only having one in doesnt matter either, they boot in the baseboard.

is there a way to plug something into the USB port on the cluster board to find out what its complaining about? 

any help would be much appreciated.

[poVoq]

According to the Wiki the A64 chip supports only emmc up to 64gb. Might or might not be the cause of this.

[User 18962]

According to the Wiki the A64 chip supports only emmc up to 64gb. Might or might not be the cause of this.

Hopefully that wouldnt have caused it to completely die, i would think thats a bit of a fail.

i can pull the EMMC out of my pinebook pro and use that, this is what i get for wanting quicker local storage.

i guess i gotta hook up a serial interface and figure out whats going on.

anybody got suggestions on what i should be looking for in the cluster board?

[User 18962]

Turns out the issue was the network issue that has been an issue with armbian, im not sure why it started happening as soon as i added the EMMC, but its working now.

i had to attach a serial cable to the GPIO to get TTY and found it was fully booted.

i also am fully able to use the 128gb EMMC module on the cluster board. ill be setting it up for internal NFS server.

[poVoq]

Ok that's great news. I was wondering if I can use the 128GB emmc I have with my cluster board as well

[User 18962]

Id say give it a try! its really nice to have the extra space to play around with, ill probly only ever use 30gb max, but if i ever wanna expand in the future it will be helpful, im working on a stacked cluster box (3-4 cluster boards) to run my kubernetes work load and openMPI for number crunching.

[poVoq]

Turns out the issue was the network issue that has been an issue with armbian, im not sure why it started happening as soon as i added the EMMC, but its working now.

i had to attach a serial cable to the GPIO to get TTY and found it was fully booted.

i also am fully able to use the 128gb EMMC module on the cluster board. ill be setting it up for internal NFS server.

Any hint on how you installed Armbian to get it to work?

I followed this guide, which works with SD cards, but somehow not with my 128GB emmc:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...&pid=74850

[User 18962]

your trying to install armbian to the EMMC? does it boot at all and just not get network?

i use a pack of 10 sd cards i got for $20 on my cluster, EMMC is storage only for me.

[poVoq]

I am flashing Armbian focal as described in the link I posted via a USB to emmc adapter. Doing the exact same thing with a SD card works including the network.

Sadly I don't have a serial adapter, so I am not quite sure where it fails exactly with the emmc. But the Sopine in slot 0 that is connected to the emmc never requests a DHCP lease.

So I was wondering if you could give me some more details on how you installed Armbian on your 128gb emmc so that I can try and replicate that. Thanks

Edit: Ahh, did I misunderstand and you are booting from a SD, and the emmc is just connected as storage? Hmm, I need to have a look at that, might be sufficient for my use case as well (I just want faster access storage for some specific items such as a database).

[poVoq]

When booting from SD, how does the emmc show up?

I assumed it would be /dev/mmcblk1 as the SD seems to be /dev/mmcblk0 and USB disks show up as /dev/sda, but I can't seem to find that on my Sopine connected to slot 0.

Edit: with the lsblk command it looks like the 128gb emmc is not recognized at all on my Armbian focal system when booting from SD. Normally I would have assumed only 64gb is supported, but since you have it working, it would be interesting to hear any suggestions. I used the emmc usb adapter to format it as a blank ext4 disk.

Edit2: Using the USB adapter the emmc on a USB2 port gets recognized as /dev/sda1, but for actual speed improvement I need to use the emmc slot next to module 0 I would guess.