[Volunteer needed]Too high DRAM clock speed MAY be causing you random crashes/freezes

[devrtz]

I have uploaded a new binary with the current u-boot from mobians u-boot fork and lowered the speed to 492MHz for the people where the lowest speed did not yet help.

Check the OP in case you suspect you are suffering from this issue and the binaries I had uploaded before have not helped you.

[Subsentient]

Mine would crash only rarely, but after underclocking the DRAM to 492Mhz with your u-boot images, my phone runs considerably cooler and I'm not seeing a noticeable performance hit. Time will tell if it helps the rare crashes, however. I'm surprised a change of less than 100Mhz is making such a huge difference in thermals.

[Nooblife]

In ubports you need to run the command without bs=8k seek=1 and target the loader partition. Source

[gotomech]

I have uploaded a new binary with the current u-boot from mobians u-boot fork and lowered the speed to 492MHz for the people where the lowest speed did not yet help.

Check the OP in case you suspect you are suffering from this issue and the binaries I had uploaded before have not helped you.

Thanks for doing this! I am literally having to use your u-boot on quite a few of the newest builds, because I am the unlucky silicon lottery player who can't use any of the memory speed boosts and everyone is trying to get the most out of the PP without leaving a weaker option available for those of us who just can't keep up.

I'd hate to have to see Pine64 trying to test the memory modules of each board to see if it will work for the new speed boosts everyone is trying to add. But I also don't think customers would like getting new OS updates that completely crash their phone before they can even log in. (It's a little frustrating)

[Luke]

@devrtz do the instructions in OP still work in newer builds / nightlies?
Flashed more than one PinePhone and always end up with white LED and no boot.

For reference:

Code:

sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl-600.bin of=/dev/sdg bs=8k seek=1

[devrtz]

@devrtz do the instructions in OP still work in newer builds / nightlies?
Flashed more than one PinePhone and always end up with white LED and no boot.

For reference:

Code:

sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl-600.bin of=/dev/sdg bs=8k seek=1

I just flashed the latest image I had built (492MHz) and it boots with the instructions from the OP. Do you have a serial connection handy to check where it hangs?

You may want to try this image:
https://fortysixandtwo.eu/upload/u-boot-...pl-492.bin
It is the latest one I built. But be aware that deep sleep didn't seem to be working for me.

Sidenote:

I think "u-boot-install-sunxi64" should be used nowadays to update u-boot in mobian. Not sure if you can just replace the binary in
"/usr/lib/u-boot/pinephone/u-boot.bin" then run "u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/XXX" and have it working..

Maybe I should look into building a .deb file. I think in this case the postinstall scripts take care of everything!

[megous]

I wrote a simple memtest that automatically cycles through various possible dram controller clocks and that can do tests over the entire DRAM address space:

https://megous.com/git/p-boot/log/?h=memtest

It probably doesn't give enough time to testing the memory at each frequency point, but it's easy to patch to do longer runs of tests.

It can be used the same way u-boot can be used. Replace u-boot with it at 8KiB offset on the SD card and reboot. Serial console access is needed to view the results/progress.

[gotomech]

@devrtz do the instructions in OP still work in newer builds / nightlies?
Flashed more than one PinePhone and always end up with white LED and no boot.

For reference:

Code:

sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl-600.bin of=/dev/sdg bs=8k seek=1

I just flashed the latest image I had built (492MHz) and it boots with the instructions from the OP. Do you have a serial connection handy to check where it hangs?

You may want to try this image:
https://fortysixandtwo.eu/upload/u-boot-...pl-492.bin
It is the latest one I built. But be aware that deep sleep didn't seem to be working for me.

Sidenote:

I think "u-boot-install-sunxi64" should be used nowadays to update u-boot in mobian. Not sure if you can just replace the binary in
"/usr/lib/u-boot/pinephone/u-boot.bin" then run "u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/XXX" and have it working..

Maybe I should look into building a .deb file. I think in this case the postinstall scripts take care of everything!

I've definitely gotten a lot of hangs recently too, though it usually happens if they don't have a specific boot partition or they have swap or unformatted section at the front of the sd card.

Also, I need this to be a far more prominent thing, because everyone wants that extra performance, and I'm definitely one of the unlucky people whose memory cant do over 500MHz...thankfully there only seem to be a few of us.

@lukasz are you guys at pine64 gonna try to weed out the really bad samples in the future, or should there we a bigger press to distro designers to make memory overclocking an after install rather than built-in thing?

I'd love the performance, and I'm glad that it's there for those that can use it. However, especially with phosh, those memory crashes are brutal and consistent.

Also, love the idea @devrtz , definitely let me know if you get that going. I'd love to do more testing with other memory clocks in mobian!

[gotomech]

Hey @devrtz , quick question.

Do your uboot memory speed changes break the new 100hr standby crust stuff? Or does it only affect the memory speed? I definitely need to down clock to not have a crashy mess, but I cant seem to find where in the new uboot to change the memory speed to build my own.

Thanks for your help!

[devrtz]

@gotomech it uses an older crust build, so sadly the changes that enable 100h standby are not (yet) in.

I will update the binary soon-ish.

I have also not yet come around to test megous's p-boot memtest, which I should definitely do!