IRC log of #cubox of Tue 18 Jun 2013. All times are in CEST < Back to index

23:59 dv__ the LED is software-controlled, isnt it?
00:00 twitch153 dv__, I was under the assumption that the LED turned on as soon as power came to the system.
00:00 dv_ hmm yes this could be
00:00 dv_ either that, or U-Boot enables it
00:00 twitch153 Possible. But I never touched U-Boot.
00:01 twitch153 Well, I'm with dexter93 working on this.
00:01 twitch153 So when I say I, I mean the both of us.
00:01 dv_ then it is probably not bricked by software
00:01 dv_ sounds more like broken hardware
00:01 twitch153 That's what I was saying.
00:02 dv_ that's unfortunate :/ I'd recommend to send a mail to solid-run about this, as rabeeh is plenty busy and often not really on here
00:02 dexter93 We did. Rabeeh told us to get here
00:02 twitch153 That's what we did, but we haven't gotten a reply, it's been a couple of weeks.
00:04 dv_ oh
00:04 dv_ it seems they dont have enough staff :)
00:04 twitch153 It's a little bothersome because we have a 3 month warranty on it, but with the lack of response that'll be up before they even reply xD
00:05 dexter93 Seems so. And timezones don't help much
00:05 dexter93 Indeed
00:06 dv_ well I wish I could help, but I am not an employee either
00:06 twitch153 Of course :)
00:08 _rmk_ is it the case that it was DoA ?
00:09 twitch153 _rmk_, no. We tried hooking it up to the computer to do Serial over USB, to use the Cubox upgrader tool.
00:10 twitch153 When we got to that step, the light turned off and the cubox was dead. I'm assuming it might have received too much current from the computer, but regardless of what happened, that should not be the case to cause the death to the cubox. Ya know?
00:10 dv_ oh
00:10 twitch153 It wouldn't turn on no matter how long it was connected to the power supply.
00:10 dv_ the upgrader tool didnt get to download anything into the cubox, it turned off right away, correct?
00:11 twitch153 dv_, it didn't download anything, correct.
00:11 _rmk_ does your computer still recognise when the cubox is connected via USB?
00:11 twitch153 Yes.
00:11 twitch153 The self-powered uart still works.
00:12 _rmk_ ok, does the power brick that came with your cubox have a green LED on it, and I assume you've checked that that is illuminated?
00:12 twitch153 Yeah.
00:13 _rmk_ do you have something a USB keyboard you could try plugging into one of its USB sockets?
00:14 twitch153 Yep.
00:14 _rmk_ and does the keyboard show any signs of life when connected - eg, a flash of its own leds?
00:14 twitch153 One sec.
00:15 _rmk_ (to put that another way - do you see any power coming out from the USB sockets with the cubox connected to its power source)
00:15 twitch153 No.
00:16 _rmk_ ok, that sounds like not bricked, but hardware failure somewhere between the brick psu and cubox internals
00:16 twitch153 That's what I figured.
00:16 _rmk_ what's your electronics know-how like?
00:16 twitch153 Pretty decent.
00:17 twitch153 I know enough to know how to construct some circuits and use a multimeter.
00:17 _rmk_ so if I asked whether you could put a multimeter on the end of the cubox's power cable?
00:18 twitch153 I would tell you I've already done it :)
00:19 _rmk_ and what did it read?
00:20 twitch153 Well, I did it like last week. So I couldn't tell you the exact reading. But I know it was around the correct voltage and amperage.
00:20 _rmk_ erm.. amperage... I hope you didn't put the meter across the psu output measuring current :)
00:21 twitch153 Not like that, no. I measure it in a circuit I made, to ensure that the PSU was working correctly.
00:22 _rmk_ well, that's about the limit of what can be done, but it sounds like you should return it to solid-run as "hardware failed shortly after arrival"
00:27 twitch153 Sorry about that, someone thought it'd be bright to unplug the router.
00:31 shesselba twitch153: unfortunately usb keyboard is not a good DoA test
00:31 shesselba usb is powered off by default, u-boot needs to enable it
00:31 shesselba if you/the updater bricked your cubox by accident, there is no LED and no USB powered
00:32 twitch153 shesselba, what would you suggest? I'm open to trying anything :)
00:32 shesselba best would be to hook up usb2serial, start minicom (linux, or some terminal on windows)
00:33 shesselba push the little button hidden in that tiny hole on the back
00:33 shesselba and power on
00:33 shesselba you should see "something" if the board/soc is still alive
00:34 shesselba You should see the UART boot mode requesting an image, cubox is basically "unbrickable" because of that
00:35 shesselba I haven't checked wiki for a while, but if it responds, you will find an u-boot image there to reflash it
00:35 twitch153 Alrighty, give me a sec to get it all together. So hook up the microUSB to the Cubox, then hook that up to the computer. Then start up minicom, and when I push that button the computer will likely request something?
00:36 shesselba close
00:36 shesselba ..., push the button, poweron cubox, release button
00:37 shesselba what some secs before releasing the button, just to make sure
00:37 twitch153 Gotcha.
00:37 shesselba and your computer will not "request" something, you should see some unreadable characters on minicom
00:37 shesselba thats all
00:38 shesselba just a test if it is still alive
00:38 shesselba minicom settings is 115200, 8n1 as always
00:39 twitch153 shesselba, so I haven't connected the cubox to the computer yet (I need to install minicom on my laptop), but the cubox is hooked up to the power cable and the cubox is getting noticeably warmer.
00:40 shesselba well, if something is broken, it will still get warm
00:40 shesselba what distro are you on?
00:41 shesselba also apt-get install lrzsz if on debian or ubuntu
00:41 twitch153 shesselba, I'm on gentoo.
00:41 shesselba dooh
00:41 shesselba you need some xmodem tool, we will look it up later
00:42 twitch153 The microUSB cable isn't connected to the computer at all yet though. I have the usb2serial driver cooked into my kernel as well.
00:42 shesselba funky gentoo nerd ;)
00:43 twitch153 xD
00:43 twitch153 Can't help it.
00:43 shesselba ok ready?
00:43 twitch153 lrzsz is being brought in with minicom.
00:44 twitch153 It's compiling it now ;)
00:44 shesselba first check for any other usb-serial device: ls /dev/ttyU*
00:45 twitch153 Nothing shows up.
00:45 shesselba ok, plug in the microusb cable into your laptop with cubox connected
00:45 shesselba redo ls /dev/ttyU*
00:46 twitch153 Yep. It shows up.
00:46 shesselba /dev/ttyUSB0, right?
00:46 twitch153 Yes.
00:46 shesselba is minicom done compiling?
00:46 twitch153 Yep.
00:47 shesselba now, minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200 -8
00:48 shesselba find something tiny that fits into the hole on the back of cubox, e.g. paperclip
00:49 shesselba turn off cubox (unplug power cable)
00:50 shesselba get familiar with the button, press it, feel the "click" ?
00:53 shesselba You have the 1G or 2G version?
00:53 twitch153 1G
00:53 shesselba found the button?
00:53 twitch153 Yessir,
00:53 shesselba ok, press it, hold it, plug in power cable
00:54 shesselba you see something on minicom?
00:55 twitch153 shesselba, yeah.
00:55 shesselba some unprintable character, new ones coming in every second or so?
00:55 twitch153 Yep.
00:55 shesselba great, so it is not dead
00:56 twitch153 Okay, where do we go from here?
00:56 shesselba unplug cubox for a while, you can release the button by the way ;)
00:56 shesselba have wget?
00:56 shesselba wget http://download.solid-run.com/pub/solidrun/cubox/u-boot/2009.08_5.4.4_SR1/apr-8-2013/u-boot-cubox_hynix_cubox_1GB_uart.bin
00:57 shesselba in minicom, press Ctrl-A S
00:57 shesselba select xmodem
00:57 _rmk_ oh, there's a new uboot?
00:57 shesselba and select that file you downloaded
00:57 shesselba _rmk_: looks like, I am still on the very first version I guess ;)
00:59 shesselba twitch153: navigation on minicom and selecting a file is a bit tricky.. either just make it ask for a filename, or IIRC "select" is double-space
01:00 _rmk_ me too
01:00 shesselba the game is: redo all the stuff above up to press button and plug power, then in minicom press Ctrl-A S, Xmodem and send the file
01:01 shesselba when done you have u-boot running _in RAM_, check the wiki for instructions reflashing a new bootloader
01:01 dv_ I always hesitate to update bootloaders
01:01 dv_ if something gets screwed up, my poor cubox is bricked
01:01 shesselba dv_: with uart boot mode, you are quite sage
01:01 shesselba safe
01:01 twitch153 shesselba, Retry o: NAK on sector.
01:01 twitch153 This keeps popping up. They says "Retry 0: Retry count Exceeded"
01:01 twitch153 s/o/0
01:02 shesselba twitch153: you powered it off again ?
01:02 _rmk_ *argh*
01:02 shesselba maybe try Ctrl-A S, Xmodem, send and then do the button thing
01:02 _rmk_ looks like more work for me to do... 3.9 spat out this error while trying to read from the flash... spi_master spi0: failed to prepare transfer hardware
01:02 twitch153 shesselba, it's not powered off. And okay.
01:03 shesselba the button thing only works from unpowered state
01:03 shesselba _rmk_: did I mess with spi?
01:03 shesselba or somebody else?
01:05 _rmk_ or it may be me
01:05 shesselba last change in 3.10-rc6 is from feb 4
01:06 shesselba twitch153: success?
01:06 twitch153 shesselba, trying again. That button combo is a pita.
01:07 _rmk_ shesselba: I added runtime pm to it
01:07 shesselba _rmk_: hmm
01:07 twitch153 Retry 0: Timeout on sector ACK.
01:07 dv_ _rmk_: what parts of the kernel contain stuff that is very marvell specific and requires their datasheets?
01:08 dv_ I can think of vmeta and the galcore
01:08 dv_ anything else?
01:08 shesselba twitch153: It is simple, just make sure it is powered off, start xmodem transfer, press the button, power on
01:08 shesselba dv_: galcore is not marvell
01:08 _rmk_ those are the two big closed items that I can think of. I think everything else is documented in the functional spec which is pretty much searchable
01:09 dv_ err, true, galcore is from vivante
01:09 twitch153 shesselba, I did. It's timing out.
01:09 shesselba twitch153: check minicom settings (Ctrl-A O)
01:09 dv_ _rmk_: I ask because vmeta in particular is not documented at all, the "reference" only being a gstreamer plugin and some marvell-ipp examples
01:09 dv_ so any bugs in the plugin and the examples will not be recognizable as such (unless it is quite obvious)
01:09 shesselba make sure, 115200, 8bit, 1 stop, disable xon/xoff
01:10 dv_ thats the old problem with example code being the "spec"..
01:10 _rmk_ I've poked around in its registers and not made much sense from it, but then I didn't try all that hard
01:12 twitch153 shesselba, I don't see where it says anything about xon/xoff. But the rest of the stuff is there. I ran minicom how you said to.
01:12 shesselba let me check
01:12 _rmk_ ^a o serial port setup
01:12 twitch153 minicom -d /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200 -8
01:12 _rmk_ software flow control
01:12 shesselba HW flow control = no, SW flow control = no
01:13 twitch153 HW flow control was on.
01:13 shesselba turn both off
01:15 twitch153 Trying it again.
01:18 _rmk_ bah.
01:19 _rmk 01:19 * _rmk_ does this dance too
01:19 twitch153 shesselba, okay, it looks like it's transferring now.
01:19 dv_ the flow control thing is a common pitfall in the beginning
01:19 twitch153 Okay, transferred.
01:20 twitch153 Well, the light's back on. So that's good new.
01:20 twitch153 *news
01:21 shesselba twitch153: Great, now check out http://www.solid-run.com/mw/index.php/U-Boot, Section "Write to flash" - note that you can _always_ get a working u-boot by the procedure you just learned, but remember it is running in RAM, as soon as you reset/poweroff it will be gone
01:21 shesselba you should see some u-boot output and prompt
01:21 twitch153 Yeah, it says something about bad partition sectors. Which I'm assuming is referring to the SD card.
01:23 shesselba dv_: maybe someone copies the last 25 minutes and prepares a "uart boot mode in a nut-shell" from it ;)
01:23 dv_ heh
01:23 shesselba or "is my cubox really bricked?"
01:23 twitch153 shesselba, so I'm going to be looking at the section where it starts by saying "Then store the new bootloader on the internal flash:"?
01:23 shesselba _rmk_: dancing what dance?
01:23 twitch153 shesselba, I agree. It'll probably be pretty helpful if someone thinks their device is hardware bricked.
01:23 _rmk_ the load-uboot-over-usb dance
01:24 shesselba _rmk_: ooh, sooo easy to dance ;) at least compared to jtag ;)
01:24 shesselba twitch153: you need the spi binary on some usb stick plugged into the upper port
01:25 shesselba or fiddle with your sdcard (replace usb 0:1 by mmc 0:1)
01:26 shesselba _rmk_: have a sony nsz-gs7 with armada 1500 here, tried to reverse eng the sony debug port.
01:26 shesselba it is so damn locked :P
01:26 shesselba I can make it boot from spi, but not more than 4k or so
01:26 dexter93 Heh, turns out it was just stubborn. Thanks a lot shesselba
01:26 shesselba np
01:27 shesselba it also has some jtag but I cannot jtagscan it
01:28 shesselba the layout is so obvious, but IIRC jtag is also a boot mode you need to strap .. and I haven't found the necessary test pads to pull
01:28 _rmk_ helps to load the right version of uboot :)
01:28 dexter93 The fun bit was that when we won it on the xda contest, we said we'd test it's unbrickability. Well.. it happened sooner than twitch153 and I thought xD
01:28 twitch153 dexter93, shhh.
01:28 twitch153 >:o
01:28 shesselba hehe, from a SoC PoV it _is_ unbrickable
01:29 twitch153 Yeah.
01:29 _rmk_ right, willitwork this time
01:29 twitch153 From a "smashing it with a brick" PoV it's not entirely unbrickable.
01:29 shesselba Kirkwood also has the UART boot mode, but responds to some preamble sent on reset
01:30 shesselba no need to press a tiny button ;)
01:30 shesselba maybe marvell realized that it basically punches a huge hole in any attempt to secure your product ;)
01:30 _rmk_ this time I'll try not dd'ing the spi image into a non-existent /dev/mtdblock0 :)
01:31 shesselba hehe
01:31 shesselba don't use cat either
01:31 _rmk_ oh for the joys of udev and dynamic /dev
01:32 _rmk_ should've realised this was too quick for dd:
01:32 _rmk_ 339948 bytes (340 kB) copied, 0.162111 s, 2.1 MB/s
01:32 _rmk_ 339948 bytes (340 kB) copied, 22.2295 s, 15.3 kB/s
01:32 _rmk_ is more like it should be
01:32 shesselba _rmk_: ever tried to find a dead disk on a cheap RAID controller?
01:32 _rmk_ that worked :)
01:32 shesselba or _the_ dead disk ?
01:33 _rmk_ depends what you mean by "cheap raid controller"
01:33 twitch153 shesselba, so basically I should use Cubox installer to install the new u-boot binary for me?
01:34 dv_ _rmk_: regarding udev, I still am unsure whether or not to consider it a bit bloated
01:34 shesselba _rmk_: don't recall the module name, maybe dmraid, in general "software managed RAID on cheap HW controller"
01:35 shesselba twitch153: I cannot help you from here on, I never tried that. I started hacking on kernel stuff and never came to install any distro
01:36 _rmk_ well, I know someone who used to work for bitwizard who used to curse the more expensive raid controllers
01:36 shesselba although _rmk_ is possibly about to change that soon ;)
01:36 twitch153 Gotcha. :)
01:36 _rmk_ especially when people tried to "repair" their degrated arrays
01:36 _rmk_ and ended up causing more corruption in the process
01:37 shesselba well, we do suffer from dead disk sometimes
01:37 shesselba while you can easily find the dead disk on storedge or even cheaper eonstor
01:37 _rmk_ ... reminds me of a promise UDMA/33 card I had in a machine... where a label on the rear ate through one of the data lines between the UDMA add-on chip and the PCI-to-IDE chip
01:37 shesselba you cannot on that onboard raid
01:38 _rmk_ bit 13 randomly set or cleared in inode tables... fun.
01:38 _rmk_ on _both_ drives
01:38 shesselba hehe
01:38 _rmk_ I repaired it and it still runs... it's now on an it8212 card and this irc client is on that very machine
01:39 _rmk_ 00:39:03 up 1096 days, 1:14, 15 users, load average: 1.21, 1.36, 1.35
01:40 _rmk_ long overdue for an update of all types
01:40 shesselba you don't .. yeah.. update much I wanted to say ;)
01:40 _rmk_ that's an ebsa285
01:41 shesselba x86 HW?
01:42 _rmk_ no, StrongARM
01:42 shesselba uuuh, I know I have some HP portable with keyboard somewhere
01:42 shesselba SA1100
01:43 shesselba Windows CE
01:43 shesselba HP Jornada
01:43 _rmk_ this is SA110 with its PCI companion chip, 3c905 nic, it8212 with two drives, and a random card DEC never released with a PCI-ISA southbridge chip on it
01:44 shesselba At work I should be able to find some 3com NICs if you still need some replacements ;)
01:45 shesselba or any Sun sparc you can think of ;)
01:45 _rmk_ hopefully I'm going to be at the point in the near future where I can re-organize my entire network - I want to replace the firewall with a Thecus N2100 box I have here already prepared, which'll remove one of the last few remaining reasons for needing it
01:46 _rmk_ the replacement box is already handling my incoming email, so I know that much works :)
01:47 shesselba yeah, I guess that may be "some" mails per day ;)
01:48 _rmk_ I keep finding reasons not to do the reorganisation, because I know its going to be non-trivial.
01:49 _rmk_ and the cubox keeps distracting me too :)
01:50 shesselba Ok, I prefer you not start reorganizing you network and stick with the cubox for a while :)
01:51 shesselba BTW, Darren Etheridge asked me for TDA998x sync patches before I sent them to list.. then he reported still having issues with some modes (hsync inverted)
01:51 shesselba I redid all the tests, everything is fine on cubox with your drm driver
01:51 shesselba now Darren is looking into tilcdc and fixing sync ;)
01:52 _rmk_ I suspect there's something screwy with his setup
01:53 _rmk_ shame my omap4430 board doesn't have this chip on
01:53 shesselba first he said, manually toggling tda998x sync registers fixes his horiz offset
01:53 shesselba but the real issue is more likely to be in tilcdc
01:55 shesselba I _know_ armada_drm sync is correct, I even measured front/back porch lengths for two or three modes ;)
01:55 shesselba checked clock to data relation
01:55 shesselba all the stuff you can think of
02:04 _rmk_ I tend to want to get all video hardware behaving the same way on its outputs... none of this you connect a monitor to two different devices with supposedly the same video modes, only to find that the screen position is different...
02:05 _rmk_ not a problem if you have a monitor connected to one machine, but put a kvm in there...
02:06 _rmk_ anyway, zzz time for me
02:06 shesselba I'd say, obey the EDID ;)
02:06 shesselba yeah, me too
02:06 shesselba n8
14:31 _rmk_ shesselba: have you ever tried accessing the DOVE_GLOBAL_CONFIG_1 register on the cubox?
14:31 _rmk_ it makes mine hang solid, needing a power cycle to recover
14:32 _rmk_ also tried the SSP registers around the same address (e8034) and that hangs the cubox too
15:12 _rmk_ looks like anything in the f10eXXXX range hangs the cubox
16:40 rabeeh _armk_: clock gated to that unit?
16:40 rabeeh 0xf10exxxx is the ac97 controller
16:41 rabeeh what does register 0x000D0038 show?
16:43 dbsx If someone wants to add the recent chat on UBoot to http://www.solid-run.com/mw/index.php/Flashing_U-Boot please do.
20:13 shesselba _rmk_: did you check the clock gates? does it solve hangs? I ve never taken care of updating non-DT in mainline, (a) because mainline CuBox is DT-only and (b) no one ever complained
20:15 _rmk_ it seems to be - what it points out is that the drivers which touch that config register like pinmux need to ensure they get that clock...
20:16 shesselba pinctrl-dove is taking care of it, arch/mach-dove/mpp might not
20:18 shesselba There seems to be a _very_ limited number of people that use mainline Dove. There were only 2 non-DT board, a Marvell DB and Compulab CM-A510. I guess nobody has that DB, and Compulab seems dead to me.
20:18 shesselba I am only using DT Dove and mainly work on it to get rid of non-DT
20:19 shesselba DT will be kind of feature equivalent to _mainline_ non-DT dove with 3.11 which introduces irqchip, clocksource, and mv643xx_eth DT support
20:20 shesselba IIRC pmu is missing
20:21 shesselba and you know about hassles with DT and ASoC, DRM, media better than me
20:21 shesselba but I count that as "future work" as there isn't even non-DT support for it in mainline kernel, yet
21:43 _rmk_ yea, I need to get back to that ASoC stuff...
21:44 _rmk 21:44 * _rmk_ remembers what he was doing a couple of hours ago... added your TDA998x patch to give it a go here
21:44 shesselba _rmk_: you mean ranting at ASoC maintainers? ;) just kidding, with you complaining there is at least a chance the API improves here
21:44 _rmk_ but never installed and rebooted the cubox
21:44 shesselba great
21:46 shesselba _rmk_: if you want to have a better impression of whether tda998x got the (input) image offsets right, set BLANKCOLOR to non 0
21:46 shesselba if input sync is wrong you will see non-black lines at the border
21:51 _rmk_ tv really doesn't like it
21:52 shesselba the patch?
21:57 _rmk_ I think so
21:57 shesselba dammit
21:58 shesselba what mode are you using?
21:58 shesselba and what do you see?
21:59 _rmk_ that's 1280x720p60
22:00 shesselba and it comes from TV's EDID?
22:00 _rmk_ yep