I received my Pinebook Pro a week ago and three days ago I began having an issue when I turn on my machine, the orange light stays on and the OS will not boot. It normally takes between 3-5 tries on average before the computer will load the OS. The orange light will stay on for hours and nothing will happen, so it is not a matter of the machine booting slowly. I have ensured the eemc switch is flipped towards the hinge, the eemc module is properly seated, and all cabling is properly inserted. I have this issue booting from both eemc and SD card. I have also tried installing fresh OS installation s on both eemc and SD card. I have tried the plasma, xfce, and i3 versions of Manjaro, Debian, and Elementary OS, so I am ruling out there is an issue with software. I am currently using manjaro plasma as I type this from my PBP and that is what I initially started with on initial set up.
Other than this annoying issue with boot up, I am enjoying my PBP!
09-22-2020, 01:44 PM (This post was last modified: 09-22-2020, 01:57 PM by wdt.)
Sounds damn annoying
Since you are using manjaro, mostly don't boot, use sleep
Sleep is a lot faster too, ~10-12s for desktop restore, another 10-12s for wifi
Manjaro is one of the 4 distros where sleep works properly (7%/day)
(Elementary is another)
In systemsettings5, under power, you can set it up, for example if
lid switch is bad, to ignore it and pwr button to ask or sleep
have you looked in dmesg for error or fail?
If you have a serial cable, you probably could troubleshoot it
09-27-2020, 03:17 PM (This post was last modified: 09-27-2020, 03:23 PM by mtndew.)
(09-22-2020, 01:44 PM)wdt Wrote: Sounds damn annoying
Since you are using manjaro, mostly don't boot, use sleep
Sleep is a lot faster too, ~10-12s for desktop restore, another 10-12s for wifi
Manjaro is one of the 4 distros where sleep works properly (7%/day)
(Elementary is another)
In systemsettings5, under power, you can set it up, for example if
lid switch is bad, to ignore it and pwr button to ask or sleep
have you looked in dmesg for error or fail?
If you have a serial cable, you probably could troubleshoot it
I have been using sleep and it hasn't let me down yet.
Running dmesg after boot gives the below output. It seems there is a issue with the firmware which I have always suspected. Is there any way to flash a new, working firmware image to the PBP?
[ 0.000000] Linux version 5.8.10-2-MANJARO-ARM (gitlab-runner@on2-runner) (gcc (GCC) 10.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutil>
[ 0.000000] Machine model: Pine64 Pinebook Pro
[ 0.000000] efi: UEFI not found.
[ 0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: Kernel image misaligned at boot, please fix your bootloader!
[ 0.000000] cma: Reserved 64 MiB at 0x00000000f0400000
[ 0.000000] Zone ranges:
[ 0.000000] DMA [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x000000003fffffff]
[ 0.000000] DMA32 [mem 0x0000000040000000-0x00000000f7ffffff]
[ 0.000000] Normal empty
[ 0.000000] Movable zone start for each node
[ 0.000000] Early memory node ranges
[ 0.000000] node 0: [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x00000000f7ffffff]
[ 0.000000] Initmem setup node 0 [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x00000000f7ffffff]
[ 0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 1015296
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 4088 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 261632 pages, LIFO batch:63
[ 0.000000] DMA32 zone: 11776 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA32 zone: 753664 pages, LIFO batch:63
(09-22-2020, 01:50 PM)KC9UDX Wrote: Are you trying different Uboot versions? That sounds like the culprit if not.
manjaro has an alternative uboot that you could try,,
uboot-pinbookpro-bsp (manual write required)
Or mrfixit's, that may or may not be the best, certainly up there
10-01-2020, 07:15 PM (This post was last modified: 10-01-2020, 07:18 PM by mtndew.
Edit Reason: add attachment
)
(09-27-2020, 04:23 PM)wdt Wrote: manjaro has an alternative uboot that you could try,,
uboot-pinbookpro-bsp (manual write required)
Or mrfixit's, that may or may not be the best, certainly up there
I tried installing the alt uboot and received an error during the pkgbuild process.
Not really a coding whiz but from looking at the output of the pkgbuild process, it seems some value was set wrong and errored out the pkgbuild. See attached. Has anyone else seen this problem and know a way to get the git pkg installed?
(09-27-2020, 04:23 PM)wdt Wrote: manjaro has an alternative uboot that you could try,,
uboot-pinbookpro-bsp (manual write required)
Or mrfixit's, that may or may not be the best, certainly up there
I tried installing the alt uboot and received an error during the pkgbuild process.
Not really a coding whiz but from looking at the output of the pkgbuild process, it seems some value was set wrong and errored out the pkgbuild. See attached. Has anyone else seen this problem and know a way to get the git pkg installed?
I tried to install the wrong pkg. Installed uboot-pinebookpro pkg and powered off/powered on about a dozen times and I booted correctly each time. I still have the issue where if I do a reboot instead of shutdown, my display comes up garbled. It seems the besides the display being screwed up, the system comes up correctly since I can blindly login, bring up a terminal and type sudo poweroff and the system shuts down. Anyone know a fix for the reboot issue?
>Installed uboot-pinebookpro pkg
Is that a typo? Is uboot-pinebookpro-bsp what you mean?
Anyway, you could try mrfixit's uboot, it is a bsp type, it never screwed me around
Don't know link, sorry, i get from updated recovery SD (mrfixit distro)
A lot simpler, save (emmc) mbr, 1st 16M SD-> emmc, restore mbr
Right now, my emmc uboot area is blank, so that I can "test" various uboots on SD,
but I have been a bit unambitious lately
(10-01-2020, 10:58 PM)wdt Wrote: >Installed uboot-pinebookpro pkg
Is that a typo? Is uboot-pinebookpro-bsp what you mean?
Anyway, you could try mrfixit's uboot, it is a bsp type, it never screwed me around
Don't know link, sorry, i get from updated recovery SD (mrfixit distro)
A lot simpler, save (emmc) mbr, 1st 16M SD-> emmc, restore mbr
Right now, my emmc uboot area is blank, so that I can "test" various uboots on SD,
but I have been a bit unambitious lately
yeah i meant uboot-pinebookpro-bsp. That fixed the power up issue. PBP boots up each time I press the power button now. I'll give mrfixit a try and see if it fixes the issue where i have a garbled screen when i reboot.
(10-01-2020, 10:58 PM)wdt Wrote: >Installed uboot-pinebookpro pkg
Is that a typo? Is uboot-pinebookpro-bsp what you mean?
Anyway, you could try mrfixit's uboot, it is a bsp type, it never screwed me around
Don't know link, sorry, i get from updated recovery SD (mrfixit distro)
A lot simpler, save (emmc) mbr, 1st 16M SD-> emmc, restore mbr
Right now, my emmc uboot area is blank, so that I can "test" various uboots on SD,
but I have been a bit unambitious lately
Not looking to switch OS's, I'm quite happy with Manjaro-i3. Can you provide a link to the software you were referring to? I don't REALLY need reboot to work, I always hard shut down every time I need to restart my machine, I'm just interested in fixing the issue for the sake of fixing it at this point.
