Not booting after latest update

[Boern]

Hi, 

I issued an

Code:

apt update && apt upgrade

a few hours ago and since then it's not booting anymore. I just see the LED shining in white. The screen remains black.

I saw that it was installing the 5.7 kernel, so I guess it messed up u-boot. 

I had it installed to EMMC, so I hope I will be able to restore everything by booting from SD. Can I just reinstall u-boot? What are the commands to do so?
I'm also still on the old version where /boot was on the root partition. Maybe it is also because of that. I guess, when I'm already in the process of repairing I could also repartition.

[dukla2000]

Hi, 

I issued an

Code:

apt update && apt upgrade

a few hours ago and since then it's not booting anymore. I just see the LED shining in white. The screen remains black.

I saw that it was installing the 5.7 kernel, so I guess it messed up u-boot. 

I had it installed to EMMC, so I hope I will be able to restore everything by booting from SD. Can I just reinstall u-boot? What are the commands to do so?
I'm also still on the old version where /boot was on the root partition. Maybe it is also because of that. I guess, when I'm already in the process of repairing I could also repartition.

ditto! Also on old single partition version. Have backed up my user directory and figure I will start from a new 2 partition download.

1 thing I have noticed - on my trial Mobian/jwm version the screen is flashing like a disco light after the 5.7 upgrade, virtually unusable. Hope the Mobian/phosh version is OK.

---

OK, installed 20200625 nightly and it seemed OK. Did the upgrade to 5.7 and after reboot have dark screen - can't find a way to get it legible.

Suspect for now avoid 5.7 kernel?

[antiX-Dave]

Yep, should have checked here first
Have been updating daily for the last few weeks without too many issues.
After todays update noticed the same problem. Going to go back to testing the update on the sd card and doing the update to the emmc if the update goes well.

[dukla2000]

OK - running 5.7 kernel OK.
Installed 20200625 nightly
Settings, Power, Disable automatic brightness and Disable Dim screen when inactive
Then upgrade to 5.7
:-)

[a-wai]

I had it installed to EMMC, so I hope I will be able to restore everything by booting from SD. Can I just reinstall u-boot? What are the commands to do so?

To reinstall u-boot to the eMMC, the command is:

Code:

sudo u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/mmcblk2

Please let me know if it solves your problem.

Settings, Power, Disable automatic brightness and Disable Dim screen when inactive

Interesting, that means the brightness scale (changed in pine64's 5.7 kernel) does not work that well for all devices... I'll have a look

[Boern]

I tried running

Code:

sudo u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/mmcblk2

from a chroot, that just made everything worse and it wouldn't boot at all. But running it from within a fresh mobian-pinephone-20200615.img.gz installation worked.

But now I have the problems with automatic brightness. But I do have ssh-access. Can I somehow do the necessary settings from the command line?
Edit: The screen lit up for about 2 seconds every time I put in a charging cable and so I was able to make the necessary changes.

[a-wai]

To disable auto-brightness:

Code:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power ambient-enabled false

To set a correct brightness value (as root)

Code:

echo 400 > /sys/class/backlight/backlight/brightness

I'm working on a new kernel version which should (hopefully) get the brightness scale right...

from a chroot, that just made everything worse and it wouldn't boot at all. But running it from within a fresh mobian-pinephone-20200615.img.gz installation worked.

yes, I wouldn't have tried that from a chroot, only from a running system (whether it runs from SD or eMMC doesn't matter)