Consistently Crashing After Successful Install

[RocknKiosks]

Hi Team.

I posted to a prior thread about this but nobody is answering, so I guess it can't hurt to do a new thread. It has happened now on identical brand new boards, new EMMCs, also on SD, identical 5a factory PSU, factory heatsink.

OS is Armbian, and it has happened on current desktop and server. This last time I had completed several successful reboots and thought maybe I just hadn't been pushing the plug in all the way. Then it happened again.

The behavior is while the board is running, white light flashing, system munching it just dies. Throws no errors. Just quits. Green light never goes out.

  I was tailing the emby log when it crashed this time.  No errors at all. Prior times it did not successfully reboot, but this one seems to be ok on reboot.

As I have been running Armbian for over 5 years on dozens of boards, this is not an Armbian problem, despite customer service at Pine claiming that this is a software issue. I have followed this exact same process on boards from Rpi2 and Opi PC to other RK3399 boards like NanoM4v2.  Not one has failed.

I am writing a book on NAS options, so this is really relevant to the RP64. I personally bought two boards and NAS boxes and the card and everything.  Something is going on, and it is for sure hardware related.  This last crash was using an EMMC I got from Hardkernel years ago, and was unused.

The pastebin is here:
https://paste.armbian.com/zikixujaho


Here is the syslog:

Apr 28 10:17:45 rockpro64 systemd-resolved[795]: Clock change detected. Flushing caches.
Apr 28 10:17:45 rockpro64 chronyd[1120]: System clock was stepped by 3624.542409 seconds
Apr 28 10:17:45 rockpro64 chronyd[1120]: System clock TAI offset set to 37 seconds
Apr 28 10:17:46 rockpro64 vnstatd[1094]: Info: Latest database update is no longer in the future (db: 2023-04-28 10:05:00 <= now: 2023-04-28 10:17:46), continuing.
Apr 28 10:17:48 rockpro64 systemd[1]: Starting system activity accounting tool...
Apr 28 10:17:48 rockpro64 systemd[1]: NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: Deactivated successfully.
Apr 28 10:17:48 rockpro64 systemd[1]: sysstat-collect.service: Deactivated successfully.

hardware log:

Time    CPU_cl0/CPU_cl1  load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq  Tcpu  C.St.
09:17:07  1416/1800 MHz  1.83  38%  21%  11%  0%  4%  0%  43.3 °C  0/5
09:17:08  1416/1800 MHz  1.83  39%  6%  28%  0%  4%  0%  42.8 °C  0/5
09:17:08  600/1800 MHz  1.83  39%  4%  31%  1%  1%  0%  43.3 °C  0/5
09:17:08  600/1800 MHz  1.83  40%  5%  31%  1%  2%  0%  42.8 °C  0/5
09:17:09  1416/1800 MHz  1.83  42%  9%  25%  0%  6%  0%  43.9 °C  0/5



Apr 28 10:17:48 rockpro64 systemd[1]: Finished system activity accounting tool.
Apr 28 10:18:01 rockpro64 systemd[1]: systemd-hostnamed.service: Deactivated successfully.
Apr 28 10:18:51 rockpro64 chronyd[1120]: Selected source 108.61.73.244 (0.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org)

[RocknKiosks]

I burned an SD card and checked the filesystem on the EMMC. It's fine.

root@rockpro64:~# fsck.ext4 /dev/mmcblk2p1
e2fsck 1.46.5 (30-Dec-2021)
armbi_root: clean, 62545/465120 files, 773907/1863680 blocks
root@rockpro64:~#

[RocknKiosks]

Almost a month and nobody has answered this. Last week I decided to try a new Emmc so ordered a 128g. The same behavior just happened. Everything went as normal installing Armbian and Emby, then the next morning the board is dead and on reboot I get a black screen and no white flashing light.

I strongly suggest that everyone stay away from this board.

[diederik]

Almost a month and nobody has answered this. Last week I decided to try a new Emmc so ordered a 128g. The same behavior just happened. Everything went as normal installing Armbian and Emby, then the next morning the board is dead and on reboot I get a black screen and no white flashing light.

Could it be that others do not have this problem?
That it initially worked indicates that this is NOT a hardware problem.

Which leaves Armbian or Emby as the logical culprit. So the first test should be installing only Armbian, thus no Emby, and see if the problem still occurs.
If that's the case, then try a different OS.

[RocknKiosks]

Almost a month and nobody has answered this. Last week I decided to try a new Emmc so ordered a 128g. The same behavior just happened. Everything went as normal installing Armbian and Emby, then the next morning the board is dead and on reboot I get a black screen and no white flashing light.

Could it be that others do not have this problem?
That it initially worked indicates that this is NOT a hardware problem.

Which leaves Armbian or Emby as the logical culprit. So the first test should be installing only Armbian, thus no Emby, and see if the problem still occurs.
If that's the case, then try a different OS.

I have tried it with other operating systems with the same result. And I have duplicated this exact process on no less than 10 other SBCs as I am writing a book on it.  Manjaro doesn't even boot at all.  It happens with Jellyfin as well. There is definitely something wrong with the board.  and it is not voltage, current, thermal or any of the normal problems these boards encounter. It is just this specific board.

[RocknKiosks]

I can confirm that the regular images from Armbian and other aarch64 Debian variants with any desktop absolutely does not work, and worse than that, it works at first, then something is going haywire and literally bricks the thing. There is one repo, the Ayufan github, that seems to be stable. He explains that he has only gotten an armhf version with Mate and LXDE. I have the LXDE going now and have done a few reboots both hot and cold and the system seems to come back ok.

It is hard to believe that the customer support guys don't know this who blew me off. And there could be notes on the releases page of the Wiki. The one reference to Ayufan is for OMV, and there is no mention that he has the other images at all. They told to try Manjaro, which I explained did not boot at at all on either this or the other RK3399 I tried it on, the Opi800 that I set up for my kid. It seems that boards with that chip are difficult, even though the Opi4 hasn't given me any trouble at all.

I'll stick to Opi in the future after this experience. My original Pine64 is still in service and I bought one the week them came out. The organization has gone way way down hill. I am afraid to even try the Quartz boards I bought the same times as these. But hopefully I will not be back to this useless resource.

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/

...and then it bricked. i'm done.