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Samsung Chromebook; Serious stability issues when following graphics and compute guide

John Chadwick

Brief version: How can I debug my Chromebook woes when trying to run kernel-next with the Mali drivers?

I followed this guide: Graphics and Compute Development on Samsung Chromebook It worked, but I'm left with an incredibly unstable system. I'm running a Samsung Chromebook, model number SNOW FREMONT A-E 0878.

A list of stability issues so far:

  • Most importantly, all of the MMC bus seems to give out rather soon after booting up, no matter what. All I/O starts to fail and after a while of waiting I see messages from the kernel reporting timeouts on the MMC bus, and then the system gets locked up.
  • VT1 will typically start to get flooded with something like "udevd[187]: timeout: killing '/sbin/modprobe -bv sdio:c00v02DFd912A' [262]" until it eventually locks up or throws a kernel panic message.
  • The system will often run long enough to actually let me do something. I can connect to wifi, but briefly after doing so, I will usually see the mwifiex_sdio driver hit a time out, followed by a card reset, at which point the device disappears from the system.
  • Sometimes it doesn't even boot. It just stops during the upstart sequence, before any of the other VTs are created, and then it eventually throws some sort of kernel panic. The actual kernel panic message is pushed off screen by the remainder of the data.

I'm even sure there's more, but for now that should give a good idea of what's up: ridiculous instability. I might be able to throw the image on a USB drive and use a USB wifi adapter and skate by some of this, but that's really not a sufficient solution. Given that and the incredible unlikeliness that anyone here has already had or is having this issue, I'd really like it if someone could tell me how to debug these issues as I don't have any clue how to approach it. I have a bit of familiarity with the Linux kernel and a ton with C, but not a darn clue how I'd go about debugging Linux running on a Chromebook.

Hope this is related enough to be discussed here - I certainly don't know where else to discuss problems with this guide.

  • 0 Arm Employee Badge in reply to fattire

    This seems to confirm the mmc issue is still present thanks for trying. A lot of the wifi issues we've seen are userspace related (outdated udev) so people having trouble could try using a more recent distribution, people in the office are using Arch for example without issue.

    mikewinter: I haven't actually got it BOOTING from USB, sorry to not be clear, I meant to boot from SD card and as soon as possible move to using USB stick/NFS mount for actual work, as this is far more stable.

  • 0 in reply to Chris Varnsverry

    Yeah it seems to be there still unfortunately.  I thought for a second it may have been related to interference from the USB (which was plugged in, and from which I had flashed boot.img) but even after pulling it, though it didn't crash as quickly it seemed, it still crashed..

    The outdated userspace stuff makes total sense... if this one bug were fixed I'd probably be rockin' and rolling in no time...  so strange that the new 3.8 branch doens't have something so basic fixed... I wonder if it's some kind of interactiion with the changes I made...  I dunno.

    If it would be helpful to anyone I can put the 3.8 kernel + the patches from arm + the new device driver on github just to save some time...