Stability issues

GoogleGroups
1

Hi,

I received the board I won at LinuxTag some weeks ago. Now I found some time to
make something useful with it. For getting used with it I started with building
a GPE image for it. Koen did a good job... OE support for the Beagleboard is
pretty complete and seems to work well.

I tried both my own image and Koen's Beagleboard Demo image and got the same
result: The board is very unstable. It crashes during boot most of the time or a
short time after boot has finished. It just freezes - no output on he serial
port or the screen. Is this a known issue?
I have a rev. B4 board, USB powered and with both serial and DVI connected for
the tests. Both kernel/image combinations I booted from a SD card (Sandisk,
512MB MicroSD) using a pre-built u-boot binary from the website.

What might be wrong?

Greetings

Florian

2

Are you running from USB power or a DC supply? There are some USB cables that have poor wiring and can cause issues with stability. Try another USB cable and/or try a DC supply. The DC supply connector is a 2.1mm x 5.5mm jack.

You can also try the files on the Beagle Diagnostic site just as a sanity check. http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleBoardDiagnostics

Gerald

3

Florian Boor wrote:

Hi,

I received the board I won at LinuxTag some weeks ago. Now I found some time to
make something useful with it. For getting used with it I started with building
a GPE image for it. Koen did a good job... OE support for the Beagleboard is
pretty complete and seems to work well.

I tried both my own image and Koen's Beagleboard Demo image and got the same
result: The board is very unstable.

Yes, unfortunately it seems you are right.

It crashes during boot most of the time

Can you send Oops messages from the boot crashes? Then we can check if the issue(s) is/are already known.

or a
short time after boot has finished. It just freezes - no output on he serial
port or the screen. Is this a known issue?

Serial freeze: Yes, it is:

http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/issues/detail?id=22

Recent status is that Paul has some patches we should test:

http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard/browse_thread/thread/46abdfb2a329dba6#

Khasim is looking at this, too. Any help is appreciated, though :wink:

Dirk

4

Hi,

Gerald Coley wrote:

Are you running from USB power or a DC supply? There are some USB cables
that have poor wiring and can cause issues with stability. Try another
USB cable and/or try a DC supply. The DC supply connector is a 2.1mm x
5.5mm jack.

I ran it USB powered with the cable that came with the board. I just tried it
using a stabilized lab power supply, but the result was more or less the same.

You can also try the files on the Beagle Diagnostic site just as a
sanity check.
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.

That's a good idea - just tried this but I did not connect audio and s-video (I
don't think I own an NTSC capable device). I ran the test three times trying USB
and DC supply. One time it crashed quite fast, two times it booted into the test
filesystem. I was able to run the video playback test, but the board froze after
a few seconds.

Greetings

Florian

5

Hi,

Dirk Behme wrote:

Can you send Oops messages from the boot crashes? Then we can check if
the issue(s) is/are already known.

I have not seen any messages, in all case the board stopped responding without
any message.

Serial freeze: Yes, it is:

Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.

No I don't think I suffer from this. I get the same behavior with the validation
set of binary images and here the device never survived longer than three
minutes. In about 20% to 30% of all boot attempts it did not even reach userspace.

Greetings

Florian