What brand?
Thus far, Iāve tried PNY and Sandisk cards. Both 32G. I have a Samsung 32G card I can try tomorrow, but kind of expecting to see the same.
Craig
This is an interesting conversation in the context of FreeBSD that talks about hardware changes related to boot issues. Not sure if applicable, but interesting nonethelessā¦ https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=255080ā¦ especially this specific comment: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=255080#c47
I donāt really know my way around the boot process or UBoot. If there is a simple way to try another uboot for ipfire, Iād be happy to give it a try to see if that helps.
Pi 4 is picky with sdcard (or how it is formatted / partitioned), no idea why
- make sure you are not using hybrid GPT; I spent a couple days just to figure that out
- older card may not work; I have HC (32GB Toshiba) and XC (128GB Samsung EVO Plus currently in use with Pi 4 + IPFire 2.27.159), both works, but older card may not
- not sure if supported by IPFire (boot from USB, should be), but the same card you found not working may actually work if you put it in a USB reader.
Hope it helps.
ā¦ just come to my mindā¦ perhaps you can also try dd some other distro to your sdcard and see if they work? say just dd raspbian and see if the card behave in the mmc slot?
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Iām now 99% certain that this is an issue with newer Raspberry Pi 4 hardware. I was able to take advantage of another Pi 4 that I have in my Retropie machine that is about a year old to validate things. Because this appears to be a separate issue than the one @jon wrote up for failing without a monitor, I went ahead and wrote this one up 12690 ā New Raspberry Pi 4 hardware boot loop .
I would be happy to try ātestā versions of IPFire on this hardware if there is a potential fix, although I will be on vacation for a bit starting later this week and unable to do anything with this while Iām away.
Thanks
Craig
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If it is a bug with the newer Raspberry PI4, I will be glad to test any version. I have a Raspberry PI4 about 1month old. Testing for possible fixes, yes please!
Itās worth reading the advice re SD cards from the Armbian project - SD_card_guide
Using the (Windows only) SD Formatter app is said to improve compatibility and performance of pre-used cards. The documentation for that app indicates that āoverwrite formatā is needed to clear all memory cells, for re-use.
Sandisk also make āhigh enduranceā & āextreme enduranceā uSD cards, if your IPF installation is doing a lot of caching.
I have tested the boot only on 2GB and 4GB model with HDMI + Keyboard. U-Boot is still buggy (ehci error and no working keyboard in u-boot, so also direct boot from usb is also not working.) But it has booted from sd-card without issues.
I had never problems with sd-cards but i have read from many problems with the 8GB model in other distros.
Have you tried to copy a new firmware from raspian?
List if firmware files needed:
bootcode.bin
fixup.dat
fixup4.dat
fixup4cd.dat
fixup4db.dat
fixup4x.dat
fixup_cd.dat
fixup_db.dat
fixup_x.dat
start.elf
start4.elf
start4cd.elf
start4db.elf
start4x.elf
start_cd.elf
start_db.elf
start_x.elf
Copy this from the fat partition of Raspian to the FAT partition on the IPFire.
I will try to find some time to test this out before I leave on vacation. Is IPFire running up to date U-Boot? I downloaded the IPFire sources, but have not had any time to see if I could even build it locally.
IPFire use uboot-2021.7 which is the current stable version.
I just gave that a try, but had the same behavior.
An earlier version of sd-card_issues pointed out that 8 GB cards were using write-block size of 4MB. At the time, those were the largest card that was readily available.
I make a practice of:
- run āsdcard formaterā using āoverwrite formatā on any pre-used card, to erase the blocks
- when writing an image to a card, pipe the xzcat command to ādd of=/dev/sdX bs=4Mā
I have not had problems with IPFire installed using that practice. OTOH, I have had cards that were being used as general storage to hold ISO/IMG files fail, when attempting to add additional files.
SD cards < 8 GB tend to have speed rating < C6 and result in IPFire running even slower on ARM devices
I have not mentioned the sd card size. I talk about the the RAM/model of the RPi4. It looks there is a compatiblity issue with the mmc driver on this 8GB model.
I have used 8GB Intenso and 16GB Sandisk Ultra cards and written my cards with
xzcat imageā¦ > /dev/sdX
For those that mention SD card size and/or formatting of the cards, please review what I wrote up in 12690 ā New Raspberry Pi 4 hardware boot loop. Using the exact same SD card (32Gb) across various tests makes it clear that this does not have anything to do with the SD cards or the format of those cards. The āoldā Pi 4 that I have in my Retropie setup is a 4Gb just like my ānewā Pi 4. The old one boots RaspiOS latest, Retropie and latest IPFire just fine. My Retropie card is a 64Gb, rather than the 32Gb Iāve been using for IPfire, but againā¦ IPFire 32Gb card booted fine on that hardware.
While I do not know exactly what was going on, I think any focus related to the SD cards or their formats is looking in the wrong direction.
Craig
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Iām getting the boot loop everytime I donāt use a keyboard and display. I configured ipfire fine via HMI and wanted to use it mobile without display and keyboard. No display, no keyboard ā boot loop. Display and keyboard connected - boots fine. Weired and not useable!
Good to know. Should be mentioned in the wiki.
did it work?
Yes it worked. No boot loop anymore. So I updated the rasp pi4 article.
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