Add FAQ Section

[OneCricketeer]

Got a new Rock64, and all the lights come on and seem to blink occasionally, but there's no display. I'm fairly sure my power supply is okay - I've tried two different ones, but I got a Picocluster box, and the board was from the official site.

I'm booting from the SD card, and tried several images from the 6.x branch as well as the latest 5.x release. Ideally, I would like to use the containers build. I was going to wait for your 6.x stable builds, but I am under the impression things should be working anyway.

Searching over the forums, I see various solutions like waiting for awhile or not having any peripherals/ethernet attached.

Since this seems to be a common problem, so it would be nice to see an FAQ section with a way to debug the problem. Especially for those of us who just expect it to run after flashing an image using Etcher or Pine Installer. I also tried flashing on Mac and Windows, and booting 3 different SD cards... I'm at a loss.

If this post should be moved to the forums, place let me know

[hyptechdev2015]

hi, what version of image did you use? please try the release version first. I am sure It will work. https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/tag/0.5.15

[OneCricketeer]

Hello @hyptechdev2015 ,

I'm fairly sure I tried both

• xenial-mate-rock64-0.5.15-136-arm64.img.xz
• xenial-minimal-rock64-0.5.15-136-arm64.img.xz

I've tried so many images, and at one point there was a black screen, but no noticeable prompt, but otherwise, I have "no signal" on my display. Also, forgot to mention, my router isn't seeing any entries either for the board.

[hyptechdev2015]

@cricket007 , you might get a defected board? so many factors, hard to tell :(

[tpoechtrager]

Stupid question, but did you decompress the .xz file before flashing? And which microSD card(s) are you using?

[OneCricketeer]

Hello @tpoechtrager

Would the flasher tools work without doing that? I did get ISOs from both Keka on my Mac and 7zip on Windows.

The cards are all the same. Some variant of SanDisk 16GB UHC-1, I believe.

https://www.picocluster.com/collections/pico-3/products/pico-3-application-cluster-sets

And I even think they were pre-flashed with an image by Picocluster (would need to mount on a Linux box to verify that), but not even that image boots. I tried 2 out of the 3 I got.

I bought the Pico 3 from the above site with the switch in the box, and the power supply works to power both the one Rock64 I bought, as well as the switch, so I doubt it's a power supply issue. To be sure, I also tried the USB wall charger for my phone, which says 5V on it. Same problem there. My monitor works fine when attached to my Pi3, so the cable isn't the issue.

[tpoechtrager]

Would the flasher tools work without doing that? I did get ISOs from both Keka on my Mac and 7zip on Windows.

Not sure. Try decompressing the image by using the xz command line utility before flashing. xz -d <img>.xz

The cards are all the same. Some variant of SanDisk 16GB UHC-1, I believe.

My board doesn't like SanDisk microSD cards for some reason (tried an Extreme 32 GB UHS-3). A Samsung EVO Plus Micro SDHC 32GB works absolutely flawlessly. However, I cannot guarantee it will fix the problem for you.

[OneCricketeer]

@tpoechtrager

Out of all the microSDs I own, all I can find are SanDisk :)

I extracted as you said, then used dd bs=1M if=<img>.img of=/dev/sdb for flashing the card. Still no luck.

Funny thing is that the 6.33 xenial minimal image gives me a black screen with a signal, but the 5.15 stretch minimal image gives no signal. Still neither image makes the board appear on my router despite the flashing lights on the NIC

[pfeerick]

If you use Etcher, there is no need to unpack the xz images, it will do that itself, as well as verify the write. I can confirm the flaky behaviour of SanDisk cards on at lease the pine64 boards, not sure about the rock64. But if you have images that are making the lights on the NIC blink, it sounds like it is actually booting. Have you tried to SSH into the system once it has booted? It should be enabled by default, and login details are on the release notes (rock64/rock64). I can't say I've tried HDMI of late, my stuff is headless with SSH or HTTP login...

[OneCricketeer]

@pfeerick

Thanks for jumping in. I would like it to be headless as well, however, as mentioned, not seeing anything appear on my router devices nor Angry IP Scanner, so I'm not sure which IP it's being handed by DHCP. Also not sure how I'd get the MAC to set a static IP

[pfeerick]

Well, that's no fun! :( If it doesn't appear in your router logs (i.e. devices on network, IPs in use, etc), then it may still be misbehaving and be something else going on. OOTB those images should be connecting via ethernet and claiming an IP via DHCP. After the first boot, the MAC address for the device should be constant also, so you can do a set a static DHCP address via your router if you choose.... but obviously, you need to get there first. :) If you've tried a 0.6.x mate image also, all I can suggest is get yourself a USB to serial adapter (3.3 / 3v3 compaitable) (or a Serial console cable) so you can plug into the devices UART/serial pins, and find out what is hanging it up. I would also usually suggest getting a Samsung EVO card, but I would have thought picocluster would be supplying a card they know to be compatible (and it is supposed to be pre-imaged btw).

[sskinnider]

I have five now. Here is what I have found.
The Jessie-rock64-0.5.15-136-arm64.img.xz seems rock solid and works consistently across all five boards all the time. The Stretch, Xenial and Artful versions of the same build are not consistently stable. One of the board crashes on everything except the Jessie 5.15 build. I have loaded the Jessie and Stretch builds for 6.x and just about all the rock64 boards I have are unstable. On all five boards I am using eMMC. I used win32disdkimager to burn the image. Initially I tried Etcher on windows but had problems.

[OneCricketeer]

get yourself a USB to serial adapter (3.3 / 3v3 compaitable) (or a Serial console cable) so you can plug into the devices UART/serial pins, and find out what is hanging it up

Is there some documentation I can follow on getting that set up? @pfeerick
I have some familiarity with using Putty over a serial connection, but I would be working with a Mac now.

The Jessie-rock64-0.5.15-136-arm64.img.xz seems rock solid

I'll try again 🤞

I am using eMMC

Might have to give in to buying those after I can figure out the issue using a serial connection

I used win32disdkimager to burn the image

I've tried that as well 😞

[sskinnider]

USB UART setup tutorial - https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=5029

I also had problems with stability when USB devices were plugged in, especially a wireless keyboard mouse dongle and USB storage devices.

[OneCricketeer]

Jessie image also is a no-go for me.

So, will this work? - https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Serial-Converter-Development-Projects/dp/B075N82CDL

[pfeerick]

@cricket007 Yeah, that should work just fine... there is a switch on it to change between 5v and 3.3v on the output drive and supports in excess of the 1.5Mb baud rate you need for the rock64, so you'll just need some female to female dupont style breadboard leads to connect it to the rock64- scratch that, it looks like it comes with them. For reference, this may works also, but technically it shouldn't as the CP2102 is only supposed to go up to 921600 baud, and you need 1,500,000... https://www.amazon.com/ADAFRUIT-INDUSTRIES-954-SERIAL-RASPBERRY/dp/B00DJUHGHI/ref=sr_1_8?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1526619432&sr=1-8&keywords=serial+console

I've also had issues with the rock64 images post 0.6.27 and I usually use the xenial-containers builds since they started being made. They should become stable again soon as the instabiliy (or moreover, complete inability to boot the images past a certain point) appeared to be due to the memory timing, and that is being worked on at present... fingers crossed nearly there...

[OneCricketeer]

Got two more boards to complete my Pico3 cluster, then trying the 2/3 cards I already flashed, those wouldn't bring up a display either.

So, I tried the third card, and the display came up very briefly with "Rock64 icon", then to a "Erasing" screen, however, it seems the power drops out after that, and the display goes completely green while the white light on the board goes out 😞

The first board I tried does the same thing. At least I now can rule out the first board was a dud.

[OneCricketeer]

Turns out it was a power supply problem all along. I am able to use a USB port on the back of my desktop to get it booting. However, now I almost consistently get these spinlock lockup errors on both the bionic-containers and stretch-minimal... Seems to happen primarily when doing an I/O work like apt-get update + upgrade or docker pull

[   64.955556] BUG: spinlock lockup suspected on CPU#0, store/1056
[   64.956205]  lock: 0xffffffc0fef31c00, .magic: dead4ead, .owner: <none>/-1, .owner_cpu: -1
[   64.957073] CPU: 0 PID: 1056 Comm: store Not tainted 4.4.126-rockchip-ayufan-227 #1

Also during boot, I see a few of these.

[    8.578448] mmcblk1: error -84 transferring data, sector 624696, nr 256, cmd response 0x900, card status 0xb00
[    8.601665] mmc_host mmc1: Bus speed (slot 0) = 400000Hz (slot req 400000Hz, actual 400000HZ div = 0)
[    8.668108] mmc_host mmc1: Bus speed (slot 0) = 50000000Hz (slot req 50000000Hz, actual 50000000HZ div = 0)
[    8.676110] mmc1: tried to reset card

[sebt3]

your micro-sdcard seem at a fault here, try an other one

[OneCricketeer]

I've tried at least 2 out of 4 cards I have. I should label them better, but both have similar behavior. One card is a Samsung EVO that I bought as per other suggestions.

I'm also able to repeat the serial terminal freezing pretty regularly. I flash an image (picking bionic containers, but I tried stretch minimal as well), power up, maybe reboot because it seems to get stuck the first time, login, then I just do apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, followed by another reboot to get it all up to date. After that, it just starts failing. Sometimes gets into an endless boot loop. Last time I tried anything, it was my first login and apt-get update immediately returned Illegal instruction about 4 times (pressing up then enter again and again), until finally it worked.

I also tried using booting from USB from uboot with a SanDisk ultrafit, and that works for a while, but not as reliably as any SD card I tried.

[OneCricketeer]

Going to open other issues with specific errors.