Kernel Panic on Sway PBP

ARM Sway
#1

I’ll start by saying this- Sway on the PBP is an absolute pleasure. Haven’t used a tiling WM before, but this seemed to make my PBP a lot more enjoyable to use. It was even working well connecting to QEMU sessions running on my desktop. But for whatever reason I seem to be getting kernel panic more often than I would running Plasma. I noticed a few socket errors on login, and some DRM errors while the session was running. Aside from that, I can’t tell what’s causing it.

As a workaround, I’d like to try to run Sway in addition to Plasma. Is there a way to install the Manjaro Sway, instead of just the vanilla sway from the repo?

#2

A kernel panic sounds really wired and isn’t something I’ve noticed over the last 8 months with Manjaro ARM on my PBP TBH.

Could you eventually elaborate a bit more on the details… kernel and image version used, how often and when it usually happens, …?!

For the Manjaro Sway edition: its a bunch of custom packages (editions/sway · master · manjaro-arm / applications / arm-profiles · GitLab) and some configuration files (overlays/sway · master · manjaro-arm / applications / arm-profiles · GitLab)… so if you are a bit adventurous you can try to install it in your existing system image…

#3

Plasma does not seem to have the issue. If it was happening on Plasma I would say that it’s a hardware issue. So this has been happening over the past 3 days. I had my Sway install fully upgraded on the stable branch. So I think stable is running 5.10.2, currently? After that I tried my luck hopping over to the testing branch with the same result. I have been using manjaro-arm-installer from my desktop to flash the image to a flash drive or sd card, and then use the archiso to dd it to the emmc. I have also tried installing by booting fully installed Manjaro on an SD card and then using the installer tool to flash to the emmc. It’s a bit unsettling to hear that you’ve never had a kernel panic, but when I mentioned my issue on the pine discord, spikerguy did mention he was going to be doing some investigation on this. I’m going to reflash sway to my emmc now and I’ll do my best to save the journal logs this time.

The first time I tried to install Sway I used the prebuilt image, and after upgrading it, it was no longer usable. The Manjaro splash would show, but I couldn’t get a login screen after that. I could get to TTY but sway would no longer launch. I haven’t been saving the outputs because I thought these were known issues.

#4

OK, one thing to note though I’m still using the PinebookPro specific kernel as the mainline wasn’t / isn’t working with my USB-C docking deck and video out… so kernel is 5.7.x on my end.

1 Like
#5

Good to know, I didn’t think to try a different kernel. 5.10.7 is running great on Plasma, though. So you’d think that and the stable kernel would be fine on Sway.

#6

Yeah, you’re certainly right, but there might be some other differences between those editions. AFAIK Plasma is still running on X11 whereas Sway is based on Wayland… based on the Linux OS architecture I’m quite certain it’s unrelated to user-level applications and might have something to do with device drivers or kernel-level modules - e.g. Mesa graphic drivers…

For the stable update issues… in one of the early editions we had the issue that an update of a library broke the greeter, but AFAIR this was solved asap by Strit and with the latest updates and images we never had such issue… in fact my Sway is based on the original 20.08 image and has been updated ever since.