PCIe gen1 timeout - how to debug

[LMM]

Hi everybody,

-- short version for the impatient :-)

I have 2 questions:
- when does the yellow LED go on/off on the ASM1062 board?
- what is the minimal setup of rockpro64 that should not show "gen1 timeout" errror but some entries in lspci etc?


-- long version

i have bought 

• a rockpro64 2.1 board (builddate 2018-07-02)
  
• according 60W power supply
  
• nas case
  
• asmedia 1062 pcie board
  
• 14 TB Toshiba SATA disk
  
• 512 MB Sandisk SATA SSD
  

i have ~5% chance in cold-boot (attaching power-barrel after ~1 h downtime) that uboot and/or linux kernel get the pciE devices to work.
In these cases I see activity on yellow LED mounted on the pcie-board (under the sata-ports). The activity starts early in the boot process

However, most of the time both u-boot as well the kernel complain:

rockchip_pcie pcie@f8000000: PCIe link training gen1 timeout!

resulting in no pci / SATA devices were found/listened.
I am now trying to get to the bottom of this and how to prevent it.
I have read many differrent advices (e.g. increasing timeouts.) in this forum and similar places. However neither the root-cause of this error nor  minimum setup is that should work is clear to me.

I have tried several combinations, including but not limited to:
- board w/o sata card
- board w sata-card, but no disks, 1 disk, both disk..
- board with sata card and power, but no sata cable
- board with sata card and cables.
....

with all of these combinations i can 

• see the gen1 timeout on u-boot. 
  
• When starting u-boot and issuing the
  
  pci
  
  command, i usually get "No such Bus" back.
  

I tried all different sort of U-Boot at the moment working on a self-compiled u-boot master (SPL 2021.07-rc1-dirty). 
Also trying to relax the timeout leading to the gen1 error message from 500 msec up to 25 sec didn't solve the problem yet.

I suspect there is either a timing and/or powering issue on the board. but i am a bit clueless how to debug further.

Any help or pointer is highly appreciated.

Hi,

  I read in some pine64 posts that asmedia was rather difficult to set-up (searched in the forum).
  I use a pcie gen 2 overlay on Armbian and so far no problem with one of my nvme card which is recognized as gen2 but the second one has some difficulties to be recognized. I also have a Jmicron SATA card and no problem (though, for the moment, I only tested a small HDD). I also read that Marvell is also ok.

LMM.