Frequent kernel panic, possibly due to PCIe SSD?

[meier]

I am running the RockPro64 board as a headless system with the following configuration:

*Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 minimal (terminal only)
* built from "source" with default kernel configuration (excluding option WIREGUARD)
* booting from eMMC (mounted read-only, with overlayrootfs)
* using a NVMe M.2 SSD of various brands with PCIe adapter

The system itself works great, but we experience frequent kernel panics (every few days). Although the kernel is configured to reboot after 10s on panic, the system just freezes.

I already reached out to Armbian on the following post, but maybe someone here has an idea on how to tackle this issue?
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/10881-in...ll-pointer

I would really appreciate any hint or pointer on how to solve that, we are somewhat in despair.

[xalius]

Is your NVME adapter powered externally or has regulators to source the necessary VCC rails from 12V? I had similar troubles until I replaced my simple adapter with one that had regulators on it...

[meier]

That's very interesting. Thanks for the quick reply, appreciate it. We were using the PCIe-to-M.2 NVMe adapter sold by Pine, but are currently using one without any single active component on it (an external electronics guy assessed it and came to the conclusion that the board itself has enough of these).

I'd like to test some standard adapters if that solves our issues, even if they don't fit our small-size needs. What are you currently using as a reliable adapter? Anything special to watch out when buying some for testing?

I'm not the electronics expert, but my colleague working on that could go into a lot of detai here. Maybe he'll have some specific questions, if you don't mind.

[Happybuilder]

Is your NVME adapter powered externally or has regulators to source the necessary VCC rails from 12V? I had similar troubles until I replaced my simple adapter with one that had regulators on it...

By regulator, do you mean just a capacitor? Or is it something more sophisticated?

[meier]

Data on SSD power consumption is not very widely available, but this comparison might explain why we had the least issues with the Crucial P1, and were able to reproduciably crash the RockPro64 with the Samsung EVO 970.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cru...852-2.html




Is your NVME adapter powered externally or has regulators to source the necessary VCC rails from 12V? I had similar troubles until I replaced my simple adapter with one that had regulators on it...

Any additional details regarding the regulators you mentioned? Would be very helpful to our project.