Pinephone sometimes hangs during boot
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When starting up the pinephone, the notification LED seems to be indicating stages. It normally changes colors a few times before finally something gets visible on the screen.
The problem I experience is that sometimes the boot process gets stuck in the stage when the notification LED is red. It will then not continue booting even if I wait for many minutes. There is, however a way out. Holding the power button for around 8 seconds will cause the phone to switch off. Usually the next attempt to boot will then succeed.
This not only happens when switching the phone on. It also happens occasionally when rebooting to perform a system update. It can happen both before the update and after the update. Basically every time the phone tries to boot. This is annoying because I perform system updates almost daily and chances are high to run into this every other day.
Does anyone else see such a behaviour? Any ideas to get this fixed?
The phone is a UBports CE pinephone.
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@ThePossessor I confirm to have such a behavior on Stable channel, exactly as you described when rebooting. But I don't know how it could be fixed that.
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I get the same and do the same process, though not as frequently as you indicate.
One for the Issues page on Gitlab? Assuming it is not already there.
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I think there's a known issue with DRAM speed which prevents booting but that's only in some BH editions. Probably this related? I have BH but I don't have that issue nor this issue you described. I'm always in devel though.
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Just a thought
Is this related to the device trying to find an SDcard to boot from,before it boots from emmc. (Assuming you are booting from emmc).
Some little glitch in there -
Pine64 forum seems to be down at the moment, but it's related to DRAM speed which affects ubports CE as well as braveheart editions. Mine can't go higher than 552 without crashing like that. Fix is to flash a new uboot which is in this post:
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@Marathon2422 yes i am always booting from emmc with no SDcard inserted. Thanks for your ideas. Just wondering why it should try to boot every SDcard that it thinks it detects. That would make it impossible to have a pure "data" SDcard inserted and still boot from emmc. Wouldn't it verify a signature or something before deciding to boot from it. Just guessing.
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@rocket2nfinity Thanks for the pointer. I will have a look at the link once the pine64 website is back online. If this really is the problem, then it might also cause instability in normal use. Even after a successful boot.
Wouldn't this be worth a new official uboot release for pinephone if it turns out to be the problem?
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@ThePossessor It is the reason for instability after boot. Several of the OS distributions have set their uboot to that speed. UT has not, as not all phones are affected. Just a rough guess, the majority seem to be able to handle the higher speeds and the benefits of it. But a fair minority of us cannot. So, we are left to set it ourselves as we need. Some devices are only stable at 492. This all varies depending on variances in parts used, etc. Eventually, a consensus will likely occur as optimizations continue, and it will all smooth out.
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@rocket2nfinity Do you know if they are actually aware that this kind of problem exists? I would guess such a timing issue can sporadically also affect the devices that currently seem to work correctly. Not a good base for software development.
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@ThePossessor Yes, they are aware and actively working the problem, with some potential solutions. This all takes time, and I for one am very impressed how far all the development teams have come in such a short time. Very soon I think, the phone will be ready to be a daily driver.