Olimex A20 Lime 2 hangs

Started by PaceyIV, October 11, 2015, 09:50:49 PM

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PaceyIV

I've bought an Olimex A20 Lime 2 board a month ago.
I'm using the notable unofficial images by Igor Pečovnik.
The problem is the board hangs, and when it happens I can't access to the debug console do discover anything.
Igor has found the problem on his board, he give me a new uboot and using it, his board doesn't hang anymore. (http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/295-freezing-problem-with-olimex-a20-lime-2/)
My board still to hang.

How can I understand if the problem is my board?
I've connected to the board a battery and a sata hard drive powered by the board. The board is also connected to my router with the lan port, and the board is powered by your official power supply.
I can use the boot partition of your official release and my actually rootfs that it is on my sata hard drive? I know that I have to copy also the firmwares (if any) from your official images to my rootfs.
Is there something else I can do to understand where is the problem?

Pawel_W

#1
You need to ensure that the A20 CPU is cooled adequately. Radiator on the CPU is a must.
Also, if the Lime2 is in the enclosure, test it with its lid off.

Besides, I doubt that this tiny power supply is sufficient to power A20 and the hard drive, use the separate power supply for it!

LubOlimex

Hey,

Make sure that you also test with the official Debian image. That would clear software-related kind of an issue. The official Debian image may be found here: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/images/3/39/A20-lime2_debian_3.4.90_release_2.torrent

Then test without the SATA disk. This would clear power-related issues.

These tests would probably narrow the list of possible problems.

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX
Technical support and documentation manager at Olimex

PaceyIV

I don't use the enclosure, the board is on an open space. The load is typically very low.
I can power the board and the sata hard disk with only the battery. This means that the is not a power issues or doesn't mean anything?

Now I'm trying the new Igor's debian jessie image. If it fail again I would try the official image.

Thanks for your advice.

soenke

You can try to keep an open connection on UART0 to see if some kernel message appears the moment the board hangs up.

PaceyIV

The board hangs after a couple of days or ten days.
I can't keep my pc powered all this time!
I've checked the log in /var/logs but I found anything interesting, but I'm not an expert.

soenke

Try to simulate some different load scenarios using "stress" (CPU, RAM, I/O, all at once), maybe you can shorten the time to a hangup.
Also try a different SD-Card if you dont use flash. Some SD-Cards have half-broken controllers which can cause this type of random hangups.

Instead of using your PC, you could also use another olinuxino or raspi or a random microcontroller to monitor the UART.

PaceyIV

I don't have another board.
My rootfs is on sata hard drive. The sdcard is used only during the boot to load the kernel.