Flashing boot partition

Hello, i flashed my hikey with new images with a snapshot from linaro aosp from 14.09.2019. Now i wanted to flash the partitions again with a snapshot from 10.10.2019. The source is: http://snapshots.linaro.org/android/lkft/lkft-aosp-master/
When it comes to flash the boot partition with the boot.img the output is different than normaly it was: BOOTING and i get stuck and no commandprompt any more. If i reflash the old images from 14.09.2019 it is the same. What does this mean?

Hi,

Could you paste the complete booting log? I think the error is caused by the mismatching booting binaries. And please note, some Hikey board has 8GB EMMC and some only have 4GB EMMC flash, you need to flash the correct ptable image. And please note, you need use the dedicated ptable for AOSP: ptable-aosp-8g.img or ptable-aosp-4g.img.

Hi leo-yan,
yes i flashed the right ptable before. It is not that the hikey don’t boot any more, but i cannot write any more a boot image to the boot partition. If i flash the boot image with fastboot the flash process is stuck.

If i flash ptable-aosp-8g.img i have this output:

target reported max download size of 268435456 bytes
sending ‘ptable’ (17 KB)…
OKAY [ 0.274s]
writing ‘ptable’…
OKAY [ 0.002s]
finished. total time: 0.276s

If i flash boot.img i have this output:

downloading ‘boot.img’…
OKAY [ 0.347s]
booting…

and that it is stuck, i never had this before.

Hi @isndw,

Could you try to use the recovery mode to reflash all booting images [1]? The detailed steps is in the page [2]. Please note, since you are using AOSP, so please use ptable-aosp-8g.img in the [1].

[1] https://snapshots.linaro.org/reference-platform/components/uefi-staging/latest/hikey/debug/
[2] BoardRecovery for HiKey - 96Boards

The booting... is rather odd.

I would only expect this message to come out when running fastboot boot boot.img (e.g. when the flash command is missing from the command).

Good point :slight_smile:

Just want to remind, in some boards the timing is sensitive, so flash “debug” versions’ booting images are more reliable than “release” versions.

Hi danielt, you are right, i forgot the flash command … sorry for that mistake.

So with the recovery i can flash the l-loader.bin and fip.bin

What else i can do with the recovery?

After flash ptable, l-loader.bin and fip.bin, the board can boot up with UEFI with support fastboot. So you could continue to use fastboot-mode to flash other images; Please see the page [1] for detailed info.

[1] Linux Host Installation for HiKey - 96Boards

Will debian get a update for buster? How is the grafic support for debian? Has debian X11 grafic acceleration?

As I know, the latest Debian release is ‘stretch’ in the folder: http://snapshots.linaro.org/96boards/hikey/linaro/debian/latest/.

I usually manually upgrade the Debian from ‘stretch’ to ‘buster’ by using commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I seldomly use graphics, usually fbdev is supported but not sure if graphics driver has been enabled on Debian release or not.

@Mani, could you help confirm for this? Thanks!

@isndw Sorry, there is no GPU acceleration supported now, because we try to maintain the kernel as close as the upstream version. But we might make use of Lima driver for the GPU acceleration once we upgrade the image.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/4/19/453

For Lima to have a change I think the image would have to bullseye/sid .

AFAIK the mesa in buster is too old (both for lima and panfrost).