Mounting a microSD card on BeagleV Fire??

BeagleV
1

I’m trying to add a microSD card to the BeagleV Fire bootup. I formatted a partition on the card ext4 with a Fedora system, plugged it in and brought the BeagleV up. The system came up and lsblk saw the partition, fsck said it was OK. So I created a mount point /xhome and added a line to mount the partition on /xhome to /etc/fstab.

That turns out to have been a bad idea. The system no longer boots up, either with the SD card plugged in or without it. Shouldn’t the boot process time out and come up? If not, is there any way I can get back in and fix this?

2

This is really strange. Do you see any activity on the LEDs after a power cycle? The first 3 LEDs near the corner of the board should light up.

3

This is the same issue we’re discussing in the BeagleV Fire Discord. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the microSD card. I’m going to try to reproduce it with a console log from the UART tomorrow.

4

I have a console log. First of all, the topic title is wrong - the issue has nothing to do with microSD cards. What is happening is that sometimes a BeagleV Fire reboot stalls out before coming all the way to a login prompt. The attached file is a log of the debug UART from one such stall. The capture process involves wiring a Raspberry Pi Debug Probe to the TX, RX and GND pins on the BeagleV Fire and connecting to the exported USB serial stream with PuTTY on Windows 11.

I don’t understand much of this but it looks like it made it into Linux and then hung up trying to access the root partition. This doesn’t always happen so it may be a hardware problem.

beaglev-fire-reboot-hang.txt (33.3 KB)

5

I have seen exactly this myself and you are right, it has nothing to do with the SD card. (I routinely boot with a console running) It just happens every so often and if you hit the reboot button it will generally, but not always boot on the next attempt.

I think the problem may go back to HSS. I have noticed that if you stop the boot before HSS has loaded U-Boot, and type the MMC command, sometimes HSS finds the eMMC and sometimes it doesn’t.

I am not a Linux expert, but I can imagine that if you modify the root file system to automatically mount the SD card, you could end up with additional problems. The solution to that would probably be to use HSS USBDMSC to restore the original Linux image.