Armbian Buster and Bionic with 5.7.y

[khumarahn]

Hi, which uboot is armbian using?

[igorpec]

Hi, which uboot is armbian using?

Mainline 2018.11 with additional patches.

[yrashk]

Awesome work. Tried it out today. Had some initial difficulties starting from the SD card (tweaking rootdev in ArmbianEnv.txt seemingly helped), but enjoying better MMC performance now (went from 22Mb/s on stock 3.x kernel to 45Mb/s) and overall it feels good.

One major missing thing for now is that it looks like it doesn't see the sound card so can't make any. While not a showstopper for me, would be interesting to see where's the culprit.

Also, sometimes u-boot just fails out of the blue, but works fine the next time. Besides that, sometimes the login doesn't show up. Going back to the console and back resolves this.

Will try to learn more about Armbian to contribute more.

[khumarahn]

There might be sound in 5.0, according to http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Does suspend work in armbian? What about brightness change?

P.S.: I want to understand how the new u-boot and kernel are compiled. I'd like to update the gentoo image to the new kernel.

[khumarahn]

I tried to boot the latest armbian bionic image from an sd card, but it boots from the eMMC instead.

Is there a manual for dummies on how to debug boot problems? Ideally I would want to compile a new u-boot myself and somehow see that it works, then do a kernel.

[lambda]

About compiling u-boot yourself see: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Olimex/Teres-I

(some information might also be in the "going mainline" thread here in the forum.

Sound drivers are available from 4.20. (DTS bits in 5.0). I'm currently working on
the teres-i specific DTS bits - probably will end up in 5.2, maybe 5.1 if I'm lucky.

(Also sound modules aren't compiled for 4.20 in debian yet - I'll send a bug
report asking to enable them, once I have confirmed everything working locally.

suspend/resume works, but doesn't save much power. I suspect the system
doesn't disable lots of subsystems for whatever reason. Didn't look into it at all.

brightness control works for a long time already - but the keys on the keyboard
are not configured to do anything, so you have to set brightness from the
command line.

[JC]

I tried to boot the latest armbian bionic image from an sd card, but it boots from the eMMC instead.

That happened with me once as well (can't recall if it was stretch or bionic), but I either did a hard/soft reboot and it worked properly.

[LubOlimex]

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Olimex/Teres-I

There is new Olimex image for the Teres-I and HDMI out now should work fine. Most of the things should also work fine, we tested what we could.

The torrent is here: ftp://staging.olimex.com/Allwinner_Images/A64-Teres/linux/xenial-teres-bspkernel-20190121_144941_EET-1_hdmi_out_v1_5.torrent

Also improved build instructions with docker info. Here: https://github.com/OLIMEX/DIY-LAPTOP/blob/rel3/SOFTWARE/A64-TERES/scripts/Docker.md

I don't have an account in the Debian wiki so if somebody can update those I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[JC]

I updated the "switch to external screen" entry and updated the torrent link to point to v1.5 on the ftp server. I will soon start testing v1.5 with my Teres and update the page accordingly.

If you place a symlink on the ftp server called something like "teres-xenial-latest", would an external ftp link successfully redirect to the torrent the symlink points to? In that case, no further site updates would be required.

[LubOlimex]

For some reason FTP links don't get treated like regular links in GitHubs markdown. I had to use short url service to get the FTP links with HTTPS prefix to get listed as links. It is well-known issue: https://github.com/gollum/gollum/issues/759

[khumarahn]

I could install the mainline u-boot and sunxi kernel (5.0-rc2). It boots, I can see in the serial console. But I don't understand how to enable the LCD. What kernel drivers to this?

[khumarahn]

I did not understand how to boot mainline u-boot and kernel so that the LCD is working. But with armbian's u-boot and kernel it works. Now I have a mostly working installation of gentoo. This feels very nice.

I did not test everything, but right away I see that the clock is always reset to January 1970 on boot, and that the suspend does not work.

Does the clock work for anybody?

[jflesch]

Important note: I'm running with the Armbian updates from the nightly build.


Actually, with Armbian, the clock acts a little bit weird on mine: When my laptop is shut down, the clock seems to be frozen. When I restart the laptop, the clock is back at the time it was when I shutted it down. I guess Armbian kernel shuts down everything a little bit too well
Anyway NTP takes quickly care of that when the laptop is turned back on so it doesn't really worry me.

What's weirder is suspending: I can suspend the laptop easily, but I need to close and reopen the lid to wake it up (the power button does nothing). I even had once an annoying issue where the laptop would go to sleep when I open the lid and wake back up when I close it (as you can imagine, it was not practical at all ! ).
As lambda noted, it does not save much power currently.

One last pain point is U-boot: When the laptop is shut down and I plug it in the electrical outlet, with the U-boot provided by Olimex, it just displays a battery logo and turns back off. But with the U-boot from Armbian, the laptop turns on entirely and boots Linux. That last point is the one that annoys me the most currently.


Anyway all in all, things are starting to look really great with Armbian. I've installed it on the eMMC and I use it daily. I really want to thank all the people that have contributed to it.
Recently, having brightness control has brightened up my days ^^

By the way, just out of curiosity, does someone know if we can expect efficient video playback with Armbian + mpv on the Teres someday ?

[lambda]

Hi all!

As mentioned above, for general instructions about compiling u-boot yourself see: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Olimex/Teres-I

Actually, I believe everything required to compile u-boot for the TERES-I is merged upstream except for devicetree+config. Which should be fairly easy to clean up and submit. Anybody going to take that?

(I tried a month ago, but couldn't get it to work immediatly (either broke something when cleaning up or u-boot master of the day was somehow broken) and gave up without looking into it. But should be an easy task for anybody with a serial adapter:

* merge the dts of the patch with the dts from linux
* remove unneeded config items from the patch
* test
* submit to u-boot)

I did not understand how to boot mainline u-boot and kernel so that the LCD is working.

IIRC there is a bug in the early 5.0-rc series, which disables the display. If you have LCD working
in u-boot but dark in Linux, this is your problem. If you don't see anything in u-boot either, then
please review the instructions in debian wiki and send your serial boot log.

I did not test everything, but right away I see that the clock is always reset to January 1970 on boot, and that the suspend does not work.

Does the clock work for anybody?

I haven't noticed any problems with the clock, but maybe olimex firmware and mainline kernel use differnt clock formats and the time gets mixed up every time you switch between kernels?

Suspend not working seems strange though. What's the actual problem you are experiencing?

What's weirder is suspending: I can suspend the laptop easily, but I need to close and reopen the lid to wake it up (the power button does nothing).

If the laptop is running and you press the power button (quick press and release), does the system shut down?
If not, you are missing the part of the PMIC-driver that handles the power button. (If you press the power button for several seconds, the PMIC will directly shut power down without any driver on the software side involved.)

If you want the u-boot behaviour of the olimex firmware (I don't), then I'd expect that you just have to copy their u-boot script. I don't think you need support in the u-boot binary itself. (But didn't actually try and could easily be wrong.)

By the way, just out of curiosity, does someone know if we can expect efficient video playback with Armbian + mpv on the Teres someday ?

Yes, the cedrus driver (video decoding) is enabled for A64 in 5.0 - however it will only work with HDMI output at the moment. On LCD we are still stuck with simple-framebuffer driver. I don't know when the drm driver will get merged, but anarsoul from pinebook community seems to be working on it.

HTH,
Harald

[khumarahn]

Hi Harald,

I used the instructions on the debian wiki to build the u-boot. (I think found them really very useful!) The LCD was dark in u-boot. The only thing I did differently was I used a later branch in

Code Select Expand

git checkout -b teres origin/pinebook-wip-20180206
I think it was 201811-something. I may try to do it again, if this makes any sense.

Suspend not working is more like jflesch described. I see the LCD go dark, that the power consumption does not change significantly, and then I cannot wake it up. Following jflesch advice, I tried closing and opening the lid, and te machine indeed woke up :-) So let's say that the suspend works in a very strange way.

The clock is always reset to 1 am, 1 Jan 1970. I correct it with ntpd, but it is not saved between the reboots. If I then boot back to Olimex image, the time is somewhere in year 2059 (or so, I do not remember precisely).