Boot Problems going from BAD to WORSE

Pioneer
1

I’ve been having successively worse problems getting this board to boot. When I first received it, it booted right up and worked nearly on the first try. However, over the next few days, booting started becoming intermittent, and less and less reliable. I should say, however, that when the board did boot successfully, the system would run reliably for as long as I wanted.

The first symptoms, visible on the mcu serial debug port, indicated a timeout reading from the SD card. These became more and more frequent. Eventually, it would refuse to even display that (or anything at all), with the SD card inserted. If I took out the SD card, it would attempt to boot from the on-board SPI flash (apparently successful, but with nowhere to go).

Now, today, even that is failing. When I power on the board, I get the following message (from the risc-v serial debug port), and then the board abruptly turns itself off. I have removed all peripherals and PCI devices from the board, and even tried single sticks of RAM. This is very concerning.

SOPHGO ZSBL
sg2042:v0.2

sg2042 work in single socket mode
chip0 ddr info: raw data=0x29292905, 
    ddr0 size:0x800000000
    ddr1 size:0x0
    ddr2 size:0x0
    ddr3 size:0x0
conf.ini should start with "[sophgo-config]"
rv boot from spi flash
load fw_jump.bin image from sf 0x633871 to memory 0x0 size 269984
load riscv64_Image image from sf 0x675711 to memory 0x2000000 size 22089216

(power automatically cuts). I have to pull the AC plug and wait 30+ seconds, then plug it back in, before it will power back on.

This feels like an on-board power issue. Like maybe some voltage is going out of spec and the mcu is cutting off power for safety. The fact I have to wait for a while with the AC unplugged makes it feel like some capacitor with too high a voltage needs to slowly discharge…

Any ideas? I’m gonna leave it off for a few hours and reach out to Milk-V.

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So, with no RAM installed, the board does not automatically power itself off. So that leads me to believe that something in the risc-v boot code (perhaps detecting a problem) is turning it off, rather than the mcu or a53.

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Well now it’s booting, even from the SD card! I didn’t really change anything…
Is this board possessed? :ghost:

2 Likes
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Ok guys, maybe ignore the above for now. I think it could be my power supply. I hooked up an oscilloscope to the +12V, +5V and +3.3V rails, and I see quite some noise on all 3 rails. I am going to try a beefier power supply and, if necessary, add some high-quality low ESR caps on the motherboard end of the plug.

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Just confirming you have the v1.3 board just recently shipped?

And you say without an SDCARD it loaded ZSBL from the SPI flash?

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Correct, and yes, v1.3 board.

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Does anyone know the current requirements for each rail of this Pioneer board? The supply I’m using is a 500W unit with the following limits:
+3.3V: 25A
+5V: 20A
+12V: 38A
-12V: 0.8A
+5Vsb: 3A
(Note: +3.3V and +5V supplies cannot exceed 120W combined… maybe this is the problem?)

1 Like
8

I was wondering the same thing because the sg2042 manual said that https://github.com/milkv-pioneer/pioneer-files/blob/main/hardware/SG2042-TRM.pdf. It’s good to know that it does. At least I can rule out the SDCARD then. But even when pulling the SDCARD, I never get any output from the ZSBL on the RV serial console.

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I can’t find the exact PSU that shipped with the Pioneer system, but this looks to be the closest:

neo-eco-modular-550-v2-pdt10
neo-eco-modular-550-v2-pdt101200×587 33.9 KB

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My current PSU exceeds those ratings. I’m still not sure it’s the power supply, but I ordered a new one anyway. I don’t think it’s temperature related. I did a whole series of kernel compiles using -j63 and monitored temps. Even disconnected the fan for a bit and let the CPU get up to 65 C… no problems there. Problem seems isolated to early boot / reading from SD, not normal operation after boot.

This what I have on order:

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11

I’ll second that the issues that I experience are usually during the normal boot. I’ve noticed if the machine is power-cycled too quickly (not via a safe reboot) there is usually a likeliness that the boot process is going to crash somewhere completely random.

1 Like
12

I want to report that my Pioneer system is now 100% STABLE and boots reliably every time with zero problems. It all turned out to be related to the power supply (an older one I had around, which I started with). So get yourself a good quality power supply… this board is really picky and wants very tight power regulation.

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