04-18-2016, 06:33 AM
(04-18-2016, 06:18 AM)rahlquist Wrote: tkaiser is right. The best way to determine DOA status will likely be a serial connection.
[...]
The two biggest technical tragedies of the Pine are the lack of testing of the 2Gb device before shipment and the HORRID lack of real HDMI functionality. In the end the lack of HDMI functionality will cost them a fortune in returned boards.
Well, as already pointed out: using a more recent Linux OS image DOA detection also works by watching Ethernet activity (and frewind's suggestion to use the leds is way better than mine!)
'Funnily' both tragedies are simply the result of underestimating the efforts needed to provide good software. Since this specific Ethernet issue is just the result from relying on Allwinner's BSP kernel/drivers (32-bit code that triggers an integer overflow when detected DRAM exceeds 1GB -- fortunately longsleep found it and fixed it almost immediately and now the Remix folks also adopted that single line of fixed code) and the same applies to HDMI/EDID issues.
We talked about that stuff 2 weeks ago and I did also some tests just to realize to better stay away from this horrible BSP kernel (nearly all of the linux-sunxi devs are looking forward to run mainline kernel on the device so expect that software support situation for the old 3.10.65 kernel might get even worse as soon as apritzel is rolling out mainline kernel images
)