Intermittent Boot problems on SD booting IMX53 QSB-R board

JeffBallif · ‎04-30-2012

Folks,

I have been working through an issue with the imx53 kernel boot sequence. The following occurs. I have an IMX53-QSB-R board (Several in fact) that when the power has been off for more than a few minutes the kernel will fail to mount the sdcard file system. The power on boot sequence is: U-boot starts and loads the kernel successfully from the SD card. The kernel begins to load drivers and then when it gets to mounting the android file systems the mounts fail with a mmc0: error -110 initialising mmc card.

If I cycle the power one more time everything boots just fine. I have some imx53 boards that boot fine every time and I have some that exhibit the this strange behavior. I am using the latest adeno Android bsp.

I dug down into the mmc driver and the timeout seems to be occuring when the cid command is being sent to the mmc interface at probing.

Does anyone have any ideas on this one. I have searched and searched and I have not found solutions.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jeff

JeffBallif · ‎05-02-2012

Henri,

Thanks for the reply.

More data on the intermittent boot up. U-boot boots from the SD card everytime just fine on all of my quick start boards. *( I currently have 20 of them running). I have never seen U-boot fail. After a lot more investigation it seems that the problem only occurs where there is some data on Partition 6 of the SD card. The same machine with a very small amount of data on the SD card will boot everytime. But once I add about 3Meg of data to the card in seperate files the mmc card will not be recognized in the the linux/Android boot process and the boot will fail.

When the failure happens the services in init.rc will not start. The files can't be found. From the boot log it looks like there is a race condition in the boot process. The mmc timeout error always happens after init.rc tries to open files on the SD card.

HenriBragge · ‎05-02-2012

I have seen something similar with i.MX53 SABRE-AI board. Sometimes (like 1/2 or 1/3 of times) when I plug in the power cable, power leds turn on but I get no output on U-boot whatsoever (when booting from SD). Booting from NAND works every time.