Dear Luca Ceresoli,
On 19.12.2012 12:28, Luca Ceresoli wrote:
Hi all,
I am facing a problem with some boards that do not boot after some weeks or months of normal usage, being unable to attach UBI. They do not boot anymore event after a power cycle, in other words they are totally bricked. I don't know exactly what problem UBI has, but it is recoverable by Linux, but apparently not by U-Boot.
The boards are DIG297 (dig297 board in mainline U-Boot), based on OMAP3530 and equipped with a NAND flash (Micron MT29F2G16ABBEAHC) as their unique permanent storage.
U-Boot v2012.04.01 starts correctly. The bootcmd tries to load the kernel from UBI, starting with the following commands:
echo Booting from nand ... setenv bootargs console=ttyO2,115200n8 mtdparts=omap2-nand.0:768k(uboot),128k(reserved),128k(uboot-env),-(ubi) ubi.mtd=3 root=ubi0:rootfs ro rootfstype=ubifs ip=.... ubi part nand0,3 ...
On "bricked" devices the output of the "ubi part nand0,3" command is:
Creating 1 MTD partitions on "nand0": 0x000000100000-0x000010000000 : "mtd=3" UBI: attaching mtd1 to ubi0 UBI: physical eraseblock size: 131072 bytes (128 KiB) UBI: logical eraseblock size: 129024 bytes UBI: smallest flash I/O unit: 2048 UBI: sub-page size: 512 UBI: VID header offset: 512 (aligned 512) UBI: data offset: 2048 UBI error: ubi_wl_init_scan: no enough physical eraseblocks (0, need 1)
Now the device is totally blocked, and power cycling does not change the result.
have you tried to increase the malloc arena in u-boot (CONIG_SYS_MALLOC_LEN)? We had errors like this before [1],[2] and [3], maybe others - apparently with another error message, but please give it a try. We know ubi recovery needs some ram and 1MiB may be not enough.
The interesting thing is that if I load Linux (2.6.37 + OMAP patches + board support patches) via TFTP and boot it with bootm, it correctly attaches UBI (fixing any problem it may have) and boots correctly. After that the board is unbricked: U-Boot can boot again normally from NAND.
The fact that linux can recover with a quite old version points for me towards 'environment constraints' like to few memory in u-boot. Unfortunately the error messages in u-boots ubi sometimes missing such details (like -ENOMEM as in [1]).
Best regards
Andreas Bießmann
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/124769 [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/145526 [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/145655