Minnowboard hang during power-on with 0.94 firmware

[pe...@phred.org]

Hello,

I've been hitting a problem with mine during power-on.  Very often when I power up the board prints "Running from SPI Flash" to the serial port and then hangs with all four green LEDs hit.  It's intermittent - sometimes it will hit 5 or 6 times in a row before getting to "Memory Available" and continuing on with boot.  Other times (like right now) I cannot get it to hit at all.  Honestly it seems to be worse when the board is cold.

When hung the reset button does nothing.  I have to power cycle, sometimes repeatedly, until it finally boots.

I'm running 0.94 firmware.  I seem to recall hitting this with 0.93 as well, but I cannot be sure.

Is this a known issue? 

[Amaya, Elmer A]

Hi Peter,

 

I haven’t seen this issue with my board with either firmware version.  Let me check with our firmware team, but It is possible that you may have a bad board.

 

Thanks,

Elmer

[Amaya, Elmer A]

Hi Peter,

 

I just got an update from our firmware team – This is a known hardware issue where the CPU is not properly locking in the correct memory configuration.  The CPU fails hard during the memory test to the point that the ITP is unable to break in.  We will provide a workaround in the firmware for this issue.

 

Thanks,

Elmer

[Peter Wieland]

That’s great.  Do you have a timeline for the next firmware drop?

 

-p

[Amaya, Elmer A]

Hi Peter,

 

The upcoming release (within two weeks) is v0.95 and it will not contain the workaround.  A subsequent version with the workaround is the one you would need and I don’t have a timeline for its release yet.  Once I have a hard date, I will notify you.

 

Thanks,

Elmer

[Peter Wieland]

[Klaus Siegesleitner]

Hi!

I had the same problem with my Minnow-Board with firmware 0.94.
When powering it up, in ~9 of 10 cases the 4 green LEDs were lit, on the serial console "Running from SPI Flash" and "Memory Available" was shown, but that was all. Reset Button didn't work.
It booted after every ~10th power on cycle.

Since it seemed to be a hardware-problem to me at first I ordered a second one.
But his showed exactly the same bahaviour.

As the next step i flashed both to the UEFI 1.0 firmware.
This worked easy with a 4GB USB stick (a 32GB stick was not detected by UEFI).
Interesting was that the time to flash the boards seemed to be different.

The board which took longer to flash works proper now - it boots every time I connect it to the 5V.
The other one still hangs with only the 4 LEDs lit.
Maybe a reflash could make it work as well - but I didnt test this until now.

Hope this helps!

Gtx,
klausix!

[Peter Wieland]

Yes – I had the same experience.  I should have circled back to the list to say that.

 

-p