U-boot broken after Manjaro update in PineBook Pro

ARM Technical Assistance
1

After over a month, I’ve updated Manjaro (with yay) on my PineBook Pro. In the log, I saw a message concerning updating u-boot. I followed the instructions (I did that a few times in the past without problems). Reboot. The result is that u-boot detects Manjaro, but then the screen stays blank. Now, I cannot even boot from SD or USB (as I was able to do in the past).

It might be similar to Pinebook Pro won't boot after manjaro-arm-installer install on emmc. U-Boot problem?, but I simply updated the system and followed the instructions to update u-boot.

Any clue, please?

Thanks in advance

2

Some good advice regarding boot firmware, like UEFI, U-boot and CoreBoot:

If they work on your system, there’s usually no reason to update/reflash them.

The u-boot packages for the Pinebook Pro we have in the repository, has been tested to work. So not sure what is going wrong on your end.

EDIT: I just noticed that stable branch was still on a “broken” one. So just forwarded our fixed one.

3

By looking at the other thread I linked, looks like uboot might be the culprit. I was able to boot from SD and USB before, but I can’t do that anymore.

If that’s a so dangerous operation to update uboot, maybe you should warn about that in the log, otherwise, one is tempted to do that: as you print in the log it looks like an innocent operation.

I guess there’s no easy way to fix that now, is there?

4

It’s boot firmware. There’s a reason why we don’t flash it for you.

As I just pushed an update that has been tested to work, you need to reflash the new one when your mirrors syncs in the new one for your updates. If that’s not possible for you to access, you need to disable the eMMC by the eMMC switch on the main board, then you can boot from the SD card and reflash a working u-boot to eMMC.

5

I haven’t found documentation about that switch, do you happen to have a link, please?

6

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Mainboard_Switches_and_Buttons

Number 24 in that list.

Beware, newer Pinebooks might have it placed somewhere else.

7

Hi guys,

I foolishly followed the instructions that came with the u-boot update, and now S3 suspend is b0rked (it just shuts down when I close the lid or issue a systemctl suspend).
(I had to reinstall, too, as I had no video on boot, but that’s not a biggie).

I found this thread which mentions using the uboot-pinebookpro-bsp package to restore the functionality, but I can’t find that anywhere in the repos or in AUR. I found it on github, but the build instructions were as long as my arm (pun not intended).

Does anyone have a copy of this I can flash to restore the bootloader to a fully-functioning state?