Pinebook Pro instability problem and fix.

[Russell L. Carter]

On 2020-02-21 02:17, Søren Schmidt wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 21 Feb 2020, at 00.45, Russell L. Carter <rcarter at pinyon.org>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Søren,
>> 
>> On 2020-02-20 13:10, Søren Schmidt wrote:
>>> Hi gang! I have been wrestling my Pinebook Pro instability
>>> problem for some time. The problem was that if I just let it boot
>>> it would occasionally hang silently, just lock up totally
>>> unresponsive, if I changed the clock speed it would run stable. I
>>> finally figured out the problem and its actually quite simple. On
>>> boot we set all the regulators initially to their lowest possible
>>> voltage, this in my case is too low to make the little cpu’s run
>>> reliably. U-boot sets the lcpu voltage to 900mv and speed to
>>> 816Mhz, on boot we re-adjust the voltage to 750mv which is too
>>> low for my cpus to work reliably @ 816Mhz. I’ve added support for
>>> the regulator-init-microvolt setting and set that to 900000mv as
>>> per spec in the DTS, and that solves the issue. Now running all 6
>>> cores with changeable frequencies and no problems what so ever. 
>>> Patches on request if needed…
>> 
>> This is -current I assume.  Do you have Xorg up?  My Pinebook Pro
>> is sitting on the table waiting for debian-testing to transition
>> from kernel 5.4 to 5.6 so that, possibly, maybe, X works again.
>> 
>> However, I'd ditch debian with prejudice if I could bring up X on
>> the Pinebook Pro with FreeBSD.  No need for HW acceleration. I also
>> don't care much about the camera, microphone, etc.
> 
> Yes this is -current. And no video drivers yet AFAIK. This at least
> for me makes it a stable platform to work on, headless for now
> though, which makes progress a lot easier. However if nobody else is
> working on it I will look into getting (simple) video going in the
> not too distant future, but time is sparse..

Ok, thanks, good to know.  It's a beautiful little machine and I look
forward to bringing up -current on it in the next months.

Russell


> -Søren
>