Non-working Dragonboard 410c eMMC

Products Support DragonBoard410c
#1

We have integrated Dragonboard 410c into our product and have deployed them. Several of them became defective after 1-2 years and they were unable to boot with its internal eMMC.

Environment of Defective Dragonboards:

  • Android OS
  • Boot using eMMC

We have analyzed a few of the defective Dragonboard 410c using Debian Linux bootable microSD card. So far, we found that all of them have one of these eMMC issues:

  • The eMMC couldn’t even be detected. In dmesg, I found mmc0: tuning execution failed: -5 and mmc0: error -5 whilst initialising MMC card.
  • Reading the eMMC would generate errors on dmesg. cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0\:0001/life_time returned 0x0b 0x0b
  • The eMMC can be read. But it couldn’t be written. Its content is corrupted. cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1\:0001/life_time returned 0x09 0x0b

I’m surprised that I couldn’t find any related issue in this forum. I wonder if we’re actually alone.

Here’s our questions:

  • We wonder if it’s a known issue of Dragonboard 410c
  • Please advise if replacing the eMMC would fix the issue

Thank you!

#2

I’ve never heard about this before (although be aware that Arrow are the supplier so they would get any returns).

The life time errors suggest that there was heavy disk activity during the board mission and it killed the MMC: https://elinux.org/images/2/2c/Wear_Estimation_for_Devices_with_eMMC_Flash_Memory.pdf . It would be a good idea to measure disk write activity during device operation and see if there is anything that can be stripped out.

It seems likely that replacing the eMMC will fix the problem so it might be worth a try (although IIRC DB410C uses a combo device so sourcing the replacement part will not be much fun and may simply be too expensive to consider).