Freeze

[Ingen]

Hi!
New user. Bought the Pinebook pro in january. Very satisfied except for , as tiltle indicates: all linux distros I've tried freezes the computer with only option to long press power button.to get out No flashing light, just the green power-on. This normally happens within the first day of use on a new install. Typically second or third boot, and normally just after login to gui or when starting a web browser. I have tried different sd-cards, two different emmc. Distros tested: Manjaro, armbian, debian, postmarket as I remember atm. I have tried to bypass battery to run on power supply. I am currently testing memory with memetester which may not be very reliable since parts of the memory is occupied, but I dont know any better way to do it on an arm-computer. This have given one warning on bit-flip during 6 runs. I have btw installed tow-boot to spi which didnt make any difference.

Only time I experience a different behavior is when I install NetBSD. I never get lockup, but web browsers have a tendency to crash and sometimes this ends in a reboot. The boot process also crashes sometimes. I believe this may be related to known bugs in NetBSD but not sure so the whole situation is very confusing. (NetBSD 10.0 Beta seems promising btw)

I would be grateful if somebody could shed some light on this. At the moment i have a useless computer which I very much would like to start using as intended. As I mentioned I'm really enjoying this computer when it works.

[Ingen]

Update on this: Updated tow-boot and installed latest Manjaro with Mate-desktop. Recent month only one freeze (I think provoked by me) so this is going in the right direction. Not sure whats happened, but I see that Firefox starts minimized. I believe/hope/guess this is a feature to prevent system bottlenecks from causing freeze. Just guessing here but maybe heavy load on network/graphics/cpu simultaniously causes the problems. I can now use the pinebook pro happily. Also bought the Pinetab2 and a Pinetime is ordered.

[KC9UDX]

There are only two things that cause problems for NetBSD in mine (I run it exclusively on two Pinebooks Pro) are the inbuilt WiFi (it causes crashes so I don't use it at all), and running out of memory (rarely). Adding swap alleviates the memory issue.

[Ingen]

Yes I see that this problem that I experience is very rare, but atleast it is getting to a useable state. Whish I could throw any available os at this computer and have it run stable. Really liked the 10 beta NetBSD. I will definately continue to test it.

[KC9UDX]

I use a urtwn WiFi dongle and never have any trouble. If the bwfm driver ever gets fixed, I'll be happy; but in the meanwhile it's not the end of the world.

If you create a 100Mb swap file on your eMMC, you should never run out of memory. NetBSD uses swap amazingly well, so you don't have to worry about the speed penalty or eMMC wear. You can run `top` to see if you ever even need swap.

[Ingen]

I also use and have good experience with the urwtn. It's so small i forget its there. Use it on both the pinebook pro and pinetab2. Just wondering, do you use the 10.0 beta NetBSD? Or have you tried it? Just want to know how stable it runs for others.

[KC9UDX]

Where did you get it?  There only ones I could find that work are pretty large and obnoxious.

I'm running a not-so-current "-current", 10.99.2.  It's rock solid.  I've been using NetBSD for PBP since I first got them, in 2020.  I started with 9.2, I think.

[Ingen]

Not sure where I got it but its old. No branding. It only has the 802.11n printed on it and then there is barely room for more text :-) and dmesg says "Realtek"
If you are running "current" and it is stable for you then my hopes for my specific problems to get sorted out on NetBSD are are fading. I have just had some bad luck with this sample it seems but its definately usable. Maybe look forward to a"Pinebook2"...

[KC9UDX]

Well thanks so much for bringing this up!

I must have a dozen of these little "802.11N" dongles, but none of them work with NetBSD. But based on your experience I took a gamble and bought some of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/113774031117 and they are just as you described.

[Ingen]

Glad to hear that. Its much more convenient with the small type. Forget its there :-)