Rock960-C: Unhandled Exception in EL3

This started happening to one of my boards last night. This board was previously pretty sensitive and occasionally didn’t boot (no errors on console, just stopped mid-boot). But last night it got worse. Now it NEVER boots, always either just stops mid-boot, or occasionally spits out a hundred lines of “Unhandled Exception in EL3”, or once in a while, there is graphics corruption at the kernel splash screen.

This happens with eMMC or SD (with or without eMMC plugged in), running ubuntu or android 9.

Note that it always starts booting the kernel, but it just stops at somewhere between 1 and 4 seconds. Its feeling very “RAM”, so I wonder if there is any way to tune it down for greater robustness.

I don’t have this board, FWIW, If it’s consistent for stuck or exception in EL3, it’s good to try to disable CPUIdle by adding ‘nohlt’ in kernel command line.

Also might be related with voltage level, so can try to disable CPUFreq and DEVFreq in kernel building.

I appreciate the suggestion, I’ll give it a shot this weekend.