BananaPi BPI-M3 New Image: ArchLinux-4.18.1-1-ARCH 2018-08-19

Andriy_Pankevych · August 19, 2018, 12:03pm

Updated:

New Image:

U-Boot: 2018.11-rc3
Kernel: 4.19.1-1-ARCH
SMP works
Ethernet works (Limited to 100Mbps. 1Gbps is unstable ~50% of loss)
Wifi works
HDMI
LCD (Needs to be checked)
GPIO works(WiringPi)
BPI tools included
I2C enabled(In TDB file)
Onboard blue led works

Installation(Change /dev/mmcblk1 to proper device name):

# gunzip -c ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-11-20-2018.img.gz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1 
# fsck.ext4 -v /dev/mmcblk1p1

Can be installed to sd card and emmc.

Clean CLI only. System is upgraded by 11.16.2018. root/root

Download link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=12MGt_BK_fH9PhAQc6z_GrSRRGGYK_Ppb

Github:

sadmat · August 20, 2018, 7:32pm

Well, doesn’t work on BPI-M3 v1.2 Image flashed with Etcher. Display (connected through HDMI) says there is no signal. Ethernet LED was on for a few seconds and then goes dark. No DHCP entry on the router. Any ideas?

Andriy_Pankevych · August 21, 2018, 6:25am

I saw the same so I check my HDMI connection on my laptop and then plugged HDMI cable to BPI while it was on.

Try following:

Disconnect HDMI cable.
Power on BPI
Wait for a minute till it boots up
Connect HDMI cable

P.S. Why don’t you use UART to check what is going on?

sadmat · August 21, 2018, 2:56pm

It didn’t work. I don’t have UART connector… Uh, but wait. I have an Arduino, add some magics and here are logs: https://pastebin.com/V5ckAZp7

Andriy_Pankevych · August 21, 2018, 5:04pm

So u-boot works and kernel boots but there are some errors with root partition. Maybe this is because of Etcher(I use dd) but I don’t beleave this much. Can you try to check root partition on SD card please? e.g.:

$ sudo e2fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2

sadmat · August 21, 2018, 5:29pm

Sure. e2fsck says:

$ LANG=“en_EN” sudo e2fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2 e2fsck 1.44.3 (10-July-2018) Journal version not supported by this e2fsck. Abort? yes

BPI-ROOT: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors **********

I thought Etcher may be the issue too so I’ve tried to flash another SD card with DD. Both get the same fsck error.

Andriy_Pankevych · August 21, 2018, 5:42pm

This realy is wierd. Here is what I see on my side:

> env LANG=“en_EN” sudo e2fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2
> e2fsck 1.44.3 (10-July-2018)
> Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
> Pass 2: Checking directory structure
> Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
> Pass 4: Checking reference counts
> Pass 5: Checking group summary information
> BPI-ROOT: 60078/466032 files (0.6% non-contiguous), 936586/1861376 blocks

I don’t understand why your e2fsck does not understant journal fs but anyway this is not the core issue. I’ll dump the image and upload it again.

Andriy_Pankevych · August 21, 2018, 8:43pm

Can you try this one please:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d3rfQ-59jpMutXhDU4JPUewpy2c4IX-Y

sadmat · August 21, 2018, 10:23pm

No luck with this image too I’ve flashed it with 2 PCs on 2 different cards. Unmounted SDs cleanly. Same error persists. fsck reports orphaned inodes even just after the flashing. I’ll try with another card on another configuration once more.

Andriy_Pankevych · August 22, 2018, 9:49am

So simple thing and so many troubles

Here is what I did:

Umount all file systems
Checked all file systems:

e2fsck -vf /dev/mmcblk0p2
fsck.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1

Create image file:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M | pv | zip ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip
Create checksum:

md5sum ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip 514069560c36c2a5d85ddc04fd9ca8b5 ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip
Write image to SD

unzip -p ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip | pv | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=10M status=noxfer
Insert SD to BPI and power on. Here is logs:

https://pastebin.com/APwzfQaE

Image:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wATkI9v5aWRElMSGDbfZy8jeT4M3toR6

sadmat · August 22, 2018, 1:11pm

This one worked lovely! Thanks! Flashed with your exact command. Inserted to BPI and login prompt was waiting. HDMI works, USB works, Ethernet works. I’ve been playing around with pacman and I saw some dmesg logs like

[  224.250427] EXT4-fs warning (device mmcblk0p2): ext4_dirent_csum_verify:354: inode #3197: comm pacman: No space for directory leaf checksum. Please run e2fsck -D.
[  224.265031] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p2): ext4_find_entry:1448: inode #3197: comm pacman: checksumming directory block 0
[  225.640867] EXT4-fs warning (device mmcblk0p2): ext4_dirent_csum_verify:354: inode #4105: comm pacman: No space for directory leaf checksum. Please run e2fsck -D.
[  225.655461] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p2): ext4_find_entry:1448: inode #4105: comm pacman: checksumming directory block 0

And directly from pacman

error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/gc-7.6.6-1/desc: Bad message
error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/linux-armv7-4.18.1-1/desc: Bad message
error: 'linux-armv7-4.18.1-1': description file is missing
error: 'linux-armv7-4.18.1-1': file list is missing
error: 'gc-7.6.6-1': description file is missing
error: 'gc-7.6.6-1': file list is missing

But installed packages seem to work properly.

Andriy_Pankevych · August 22, 2018, 4:06pm

Finally . Glad to hear this.

Regarding the errors in logs - you can try to re-check the file system and simply re-install these packages. But keep in mind, if kernel will be upgraded or re-installed than tdb file will also be updated and I2C won’t work.

mic_e · September 8, 2018, 8:27pm

Thanks for the image.

I can confirm that the following works:

HDMI
Multitouch USB HID (this does not work with Kernel 3.4)
Wifi
Fast Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet has a high packet loss rate (> 50%) and is thus unusable.

In order to get 2D acceleration, I installed the packages

odroid-c1-libgl-headers odroid-c1-libgl-x11

which contain a Mali driver.

Initially, the system didn’t boot up at all because it timed out while mounting /boot, for some reason. I worked around this issue by uncommeting that line in /etc/fstab.

I have experimentally determined the GPIO pin assignments in /sys/class/gpio:

- 1: 3V3
- 2: 5V
- 3: GPIO 229
- 4: 5V
- 5: GPIO 228
- 6: GND
- 7: GPIO 362
- 8: GPIO 32
- 9: GND
- 10: GPIO 33
- 11: GPIO 68
- 12: GPIO 35
- 13: GPIO 71
- 14: GND
- 15: GPIO 81
- 16: GPIO 34
- 17: 3V3
- 18: GPIO 360
- 19: GPIO 64
- 20: GND
- 21: GPIO 65
- 22: GPIO 361
- 23: GPIO 66
- 24: GPIO 67
- 25: GND
- 26: GPIO 234
- 27: ID_SD
- 28: ID_SC
- 29: GPIO 82
- 30: GND
- 31: GPIO 202
- 32: GPIO 205
- 33: GPIO 203
- 34: GND
- 35: GPIO 204
- 36: GPIO 133
- 37: GPIO 132
- 38: GPIO 146
- 39: GND
- 40: GPIO 147

Andriy_Pankevych · September 10, 2018, 5:35am

Thanks for your investigation.

Regarding odroid package, is it really Mali video in BPI M3. Isn’t it PowerVR SGX544MP1? Can you please explain how did you determine GPIO pin assignments?

mic_e · September 12, 2018, 8:47pm

Regarding the GPU: I have no idea. I simply wildly tried different things until I found something that worked…

Regarding the GPIO pin assignments: I wrote a small Python script which exports all available IO pins, configures them as outputs, then toggles them in a pattern which helps figure out which pin is which.

Basically I connect an LED to one of the pins, then the script toggles one half of all GPIOs, asks me whether the LED was toggled to figure out which half the pin is in, then toggles one half of those, and so on. Classic bisecting. It takes only about 15 seconds to identify the GPIO number that way.

Andriy_Pankevych · September 13, 2018, 12:59pm

Thanks for your input.

enginkaya · October 13, 2018, 12:36pm

Hi, unfortunately I can not boot it on my m3. I only see a black screen on hdmi. I am using the image with sdcard.

Jaack65 · October 14, 2018, 10:22am

I unzipped LATEST download for BPI M3, the .img.zip ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip and the first pass thru 7zip produced an output file named ~ That’s is the entire file. Then I unzipped that file size = 7 730 102 272 unpacked size and this produces 2 outputs folders: 0.fat size 104 457 600 bytes file system FAT16-LBA and 1.img 7 624 196 096 file system LINUX. 0.fat produces an image file initramfs-linux.img 3 other files and another compressed folder named DTBS. 1.img produces a number of typical Linux folders except /bin folder is missing. The image burning software is expecting a file with a .img name extension and won’t recognize the input supplied from unzip.

Andriy_Pankevych · October 18, 2018, 9:30am

I’ll try to prepare new image with recent updates soon so let’s try new one.

Andriy_Pankevych · October 18, 2018, 9:34am

You can use this command to write image directly to the sd card:

Or you can just unzip archive:

unzip ./ArchLinuxARM-BPI-M3-08-22-2018.img.zip

so you’ll get .img file and use some image burning software.