Re: Bug#834974: Installation Report: Stretch Alpha 7 on Cubox-i4pro

[Rick Thomas]

On Sep 2, 2016, at 4:40 PM, Gunnar Wolf  wrote:

> Can somebody confirm whether the Jessie
> installer actually works reliably on this machine? (that is, whether
> it's always been broken or we have a regression)

I’ll give that a try as well over the weekend.  Let you know what I find.

Rick

Re: Bug#834974: Installation Report: Stretch Alpha 7 on Cubox-i4pro

[Rick Thomas]

On Sep 2, 2016, at 5:12 PM, Vagrant Cascadian  wrote:

> I'd be curious if you re-install and delete each partition individually
> and re-create manually vs. using one of the auto-partitioning methods.

I’ll give this a try over the weekend and report back what I find.

Is it possible that the auto-partitioning process during installation has 
somehow clobbered the u-boot image on the SD card?  How would I test for that?

Rick

Re: Bug#834974: Installation Report: Stretch Alpha 7 on Cubox-i4pro

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2016-08-29, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Rainer Dorsch  [2016-08-22 00:18]:
>> > Can you 1) attach /var/log/installer/syslog from the SD card and b)
>> > show the boot log (after the installer).
>> 
>> I attached the syslog. On the serial console, there was no output indicating 
>> any boot attempt. The installer shutdown for reboot, but then I did not see 
>> further output.
>
> The log suggests that flash-kernel was installed successfully, i.e.
> that a u-boot boot script was generated correctly.
>
> I don't know anything about this device so unfortunately I cannot help
> you.  Maybe Vagrant Cascadian knows something?

In the past, I've had issues on other boards where it failed if the
partitioning process zero'ed out the partition table. In my experience,
re-installing u-boot usually resolved the issue without having the
re-install.

I'd be curious if you re-install and delete each partition individually
and re-create manually vs. using one of the auto-partitioning methods.


This is arguably where a u-boot-installer udeb would make some sense,
but for some boards there's a risk to brick the board(or at least
require re-installing a known-good version), so I've been hesitant to
implement...


This is somewhat related to:

  https://bugs.debian.org/812611

As upgrading u-boot on most systems is essentially the same as
installing it.


live well,
  vagrant


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Re: Bug#834974: Installation Report: Stretch Alpha 7 on Cubox-i4pro

[Gunnar Wolf]

tags 834974 + confirmed
thanks

Martin Michlmayr dijo [Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 07:49:48PM -0700]:
> The log suggests that flash-kernel was installed successfully, i.e.
> that a u-boot boot script was generated correctly.
> 
> I don't know anything about this device so unfortunately I cannot help
> you.  Maybe Vagrant Cascadian knows something?

I own a Cubox-i4pro as well, and can assert I Rainer's experience is
reproducible: The installer finishes doing its work and reports having
installed the boot loader, but after it attempts to reboot, nothing
happens (the computer just hangs idly).

My Cubox-i was originally installed via a chroot and manual boot
fiddling, as I reported on my blog back in the day¹. In order to check
whether this was a regression, I tried installing Jessie, and also
ended up with a seemingly successful install that didn't boot.

¹ http://gwolf.org/content/cubox-i4pro

I might have botched something while preparing my Jessie install:
Having all the files at the same directory, it is possible I booted it
with the Stretch kernel — and I fear that because my syslog starts
with:

Jan  1 00:00:03 syslogd started: BusyBox v1.22.1
Jan  1 00:00:03 kernel: klogd started: BusyBox v1.22.1 (Debian 1:1.22.0-19)
Jan  1 00:00:03 kernel: [0.00] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0
Jan  1 00:00:03 kernel: [0.00] Linux version 4.6.0-1-armmp 
(debian-ker...@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 5.4.0 20160609 (Debian 5.4.0-4) ) 
#1 SMP Debian 4.6.2-2 (2016-06-25)

and of course, the installer started by telling me of a kernel version
conflict :) I cannot dig deeper into this today, but I'll come back to
this topic on Monday. Can somebody confirm whether the Jessie
installer actually works reliably on this machine? (that is, whether
it's always been broken or we have a regression)