PinePhone won't boot, U-Boot seems to be broken

[dsimic]

I flashed a new version of Manjaro (the plasma mobile edition) and the phone successfully booted. However, it took two attempts to boot using the SD card. On the first boot it managed to complete the initialization of the PMIC, but it locked up when loading the Linux kernel.

On the second attempt, the OS booted and I was able to go through the setup. I then shut it down, removed the SD card and the phone successfully booted from the eMMC. I've restarted twice now. Things seem to be mostly back to normal.

Great results!  The issues were obviously caused by the Jumpdrive image; in particular, the root cause was surely the who-knows-what version of U-Boot it is using.  One of the possible issues that come to mind is that the U-Boot used in Jumpdrive lacks proper support for the PinePhones with 3 GB of RAM.  Supporting the 3 GB variant requires some "trickery" to get the A64 SoC to detect and use different ranks in a single DRAM chip.

By the way, Manjaro ARM uses the latest available version of U-Boot, with a set of patches (check out the sources of uboot-pinephone and uboot-pinephone-crust packages), so it's always best to verify or test the things out using the latest Manjaro ARM image.

It is curious why it took two boots to get the phone working...  On the first attempt you've most probably encountered a strange bug that sometimes prevents the phone from booting, which requires the phone to be forcedly powered off (long press on the power button) and then turned back on.  I've also experienced that bug on my PinePhone a few times, but I haven't managed to debug that (yet).

However, I see the following error on the serial console when I boot the OS on my eMMC:

Code:

U-Boot 2020.07-rc4-2 (Nov 11 2020 - 21:49:00 +0000) Manjaro Linux ARM

CPU:   Allwinner A64 (SUN50I)
Model: Pine64 PinePhone (1.2)
DRAM:  3 GiB
MMC:   Device 'mmc@1c11000': seq 1 is in use by 'mmc@1c10000'
mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c10000: 2, mmc@1c11000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... *** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

Could this indicate that there is a problem with the image on the eMMC?

It seems that U-Boot is unable to find a valid environment file (which is OK not to be present) on a FAT-formatted partition (i.e. /boot) and ends up printing the "*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment" error mesage in the env_set_default() function, which is called from the env_import() function, which, in turn, is called from the env_fat_load() function.

Could you, please, post a detailed list of files in the /boot directory on your PinePhone, upon booting it up with this error message present in the U-Boot output?  That will allow a better insight into the issue.  Anyway, this isn't something to worry too much about.

Then later the following error is displayed:

Code:

[    0.732177] SMCCC: SOC_ID: ARCH_SOC_ID(0) returned error: ffffffffffffffff

I'm going to guess that this means that the system on chip ID is not being returned correctly.

I'm really not an expert in that field, but this seems to be an error generated by a lacking feature in the phone firmware; see this article for more information.  However, I wouldn't worry too much about this error message for now.

The other thing that I find curious is how the particular version of Manjaro that I used kicked the device into life. Having tried a fresh Jumpdrive and PostmarketOS image without success previously.

As already noted, Manjaro ARM uses the latest available version of U-Boot, while Jumpdrive and PostmarketOS probably don't.  In fact, PostmarketOS should be using the latest version of U-Boot, but I don't know for sure; their build system is so convoluted that I gave up on trying to get myself familiar with it.

In any case, the issue seems to be resolved for the moment.
Thank you very much for your advice.

You're welcome.