Ubifs ECC errors after adding Mender to Toradex iMX6ULL Image

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1

Hello,

I have an image based on the latest Toradex BSP (3.0b3) which uses Poky and Yocto Thud which is installed using the Toradex Easy Installer. This image worked fine so I moved on integrating Mender 2.3 into it.

There is an example board integration for the Toradex iMX7 so I based mine off that, adding the following to my local.conf:

INHERIT_append = " mender-full-ubi "
INHERIT_append_colibri-imx6ull += " toradex_image_json "
MENDER_MTDIDS = "nand0=gpmi-nand"
MENDER_MTDPARTS = "gpmi-nand:512k(mx6ull-bcb),1536k(u-boot1)ro,1536k(u-boot2)ro,512k(u-boot-env),-(ubi)"
MENDER_ARTIFACT_NAME = "xpac-mender"
IMAGE_FSTYPES_remove = "mtdimg"
BOOTENV_SIZE_colibri-imx6ull ?= "0x18000"
BOOTENV_RANGE_colibri-imx6ull ?= "0x40000"
MENDER_STORAGE_PEB_SIZE_colibri-imx6ull = "131072"
MENDER_STORAGE_TOTAL_SIZE_MB_colibri-imx6ull = "512"
IMAGE_ROOTFS_MAXSIZE_colibri-imx6ull = "307200"

Because Toradex uses their own fork of u-boot and Linux, I set MENDER_UBOOT_AUTO_CONFIGURE = ā€œ0ā€ and manually applied the patches as well.

The build finished successfully and resulted in a .ubimg file. I flashed this using the Toradex Easy Installer, which I believe normally mounts the ubifs volumes and intelligently copies the data, but the iMX7 example did it this way so I did the same:

"mtddevs": [
    {
        "name": "u-boot1",
        "content": {
            "rawfile": {
                "filename": "u-boot-nand.imx",
                "size": 1
            }
        }
    },
    {
        "name": "u-boot2",
        "content": {
            "rawfile": {
                "filename": "u-boot-nand.imx",
                "size": 1
            }
        }
    },
    {
        "name": "u-boot-env",
        "content": {
            "rawfile": {
                "filename": "uboot.env",
                "size": 1
            }
        }
    },
    {
        "name": "ubi",
        "content": {
            "rawfile": {
                "filename": "XPAC-Image-colibri-imx6ull.ubimg",
                "size": "196"
            }
        }
    }
]

After it flashes successfully I reset the device and it appears to boot fine at first, but then will constantly start complaining about ECC errors: https://gist.github.com/Goz3rr/3999148383d5aa9ed608316b1cc3b98a

If I then reset the module once more, it refuses to boot completely and gets stuck in uboot: https://gist.github.com/Goz3rr/97c4fbf69991e4a8c1c8a3ee5bd96118

The only thing that stands out to me is that the ubifs max/mean erase counters were reset to 0, where they were 100+ before and retained after flashing an image using TEZI. Iā€™m assuming the flash itself is fine because if I flash the old image without mender back everything works again, so Iā€™m not sure what Iā€™m doing wrong

2

Hi @Goz3rr welcome to Mender hub.

I donā€™t see anything immediately suspicious in your steps. It all looks about like what I would do. I know getting the UBI/MTD parameters right can be a bit tricky so thatā€™s where I would first look.

There is another forum post on a similar platform that maybe helpful here: Imx6ull NAND Flash

Drew

3

Hi Drew,

Iā€™m attempting to manually flash the individual ubi volumes to see if that fixes the faulty ECC calculation.

Iā€™m using the XPAC-Image-colibri-imx6ull.tar.xz file from Yocto which normally is flashed to rootfs to fill rootfsa and rootfsb, is this correct or does mender do some additional special stuff to the two?

Iā€™m not sure where to get the default contents for the data partition from, looking at the ubimg it should contain u-boot/fw_env.config and some mender files like mender-agent.pem and mender-store but Iā€™m not sure where to find these.

Lastly the two u-boot-env partitions, are these identical and can I flash the uboot.env file to it?

Thanks.

4

If the tar.xz files were created by your build with Mender enabled then that should be the right set of files.

You can add ā€˜dataimgā€™ to the IMAGE_FSTYPES variable to have a separate image of the /data partition created but Iā€™m honestly not sure what that will create when using UBI as Iā€™ve only ever used it with ext partitions. I think there is also a ā€˜datatarā€™ option.

I think you can flash the uboot.env files but you shouldnā€™t need to. U-Boot will detect that the environment block is not properly checksummed and use the built-in default values.

Drew

5

This is reviving a rather old thread, but since I had the exact same issues as the thread creator and his error description is very good, I wanted to add my solution.

As a precursor, I used the toradex-imx7 community recipes as a base and rewrote the parts needed for the imx6ull board. For flashing I followed Mirza Krakā€™s description here: https://hub.mender.io/t/toradex-colibri-imx7-dual-512mb-colibri-imx7-solo-256mb/81

Afterwards the board booted up only once throwing a lot of ecc errors and from the second start it only went into u-boot.

On my search for a solution I stumbled upon the answer from ā€œsawdustā€ in the following stackoverflow thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37407667/ubi-error-ubi-io-read-error-74-ecc-error

Using ā€œnand write.trimffsā€ instead of ā€œnand writeā€ seems to have solved the issue and I can reboot multiple times.

Best regards,
Thorsten

1 Like
6

Hello @thofu

Iā€™m trying to integrate Mender to my Yocto build. Iā€™m using Toradex Colibri-imx6ull as well.
Iā€™m struggling to do the integration. Iā€™m also using toradex-imx7 community recipes as a base but no success.

Could you provide the steps you took to perform mender and yocto integration for imx6-ull?