develop/testing setup for pi?

1st Official Post

    Hi,

    on working on migration of radxa penta-sata tower to libreElec I killed my pi. The plenty changes and each time unplug the sata daughter board change sdcard and plug the sata daughter board again killed the plug of the internal cable and then probabely the pi (caused by wrong placement of the rotten plug).

    So I'd like to know, how you developers work on images for the pi or similar boxes. Working on images is sometimes tedious and cumbersome, but fiddling with weak hardware is not funny at all.

    Is there a way to change boot images without touching hardware?

    And how to you reboot?

    Pi does not have a reset button ...

    I read about booting support from usb and network - usb needs lot of plug changes too, so may be network may be the way to go?

    How do you get rid of all that weakness?

    • Official Post
    Quote from tony013

    Pi does not have a reset button ...

    You can create one: Reset Button Raspberry Pi4 - Raspberry Pi Forums

    Booting from USB works for the 3B+ and the 4B (with a recent enough firmware update), use small USB extension cable if you don't want to bother the RPi's motherboard directly.

    Network booting is a whole different bag of tricks. Not sure if LE even supports it on the RPi4 (yet).

    • Official Post

    Netboot + Some additional utility scripts that are embedded in test images. Everyone has their own personal workflows so nothing is really standardised at an LE level. If you'd like to understand how it can/should be done, find the Embedded Linux Conference presentations on YouTube from Bayrlibre, Collabora and Pengutronix on building a LAVA lab for KernelCI missions.

    Thank you both for your answers!

    The replacement pi has arrived - and I'm desperately disappointed - it does not work, as the other one I had before. Whatever image I tried (of those that worked with the rockpi4 before) does not work. No picture, no whatever ...

    Is it possible, that I got broken hardware? I bought from allnet directly.

    Such a pain in the ass ...

    ... or could it be a PEBCAK? Is there anything I can do wrong?

    With the first rockpi I had no problems bringing any of the images into play.

    Cable and monitor are ok, as a pi3 works fine with the same cables.

    > Whatever image I tried (of those that worked with the rockpi4 before) does not work.

    Were the old and new Pi's Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi? The two are very different and need different images.

    I'm netbooting my RPi4 and have a serial console attached.

    With systemd.debug_shell enabled and kernel.sysrq=1 set in sysctl chances are quite good I can reboot the RPi4 (either with "reboot" in the serial console shell or with sysrq/break-b) unless it's locked up really hard - in which case I just pull the plug.

    so long,

    Hias

    Quote from popcornmix

    Were the old and new Pi's Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi? The two are very different and need different images.

    If that's the only chance for a pebcak, then I'm save. They both where Rockpi and I only build images for rock pi.

    Quote from HiassofT

    I'm netbooting my RPi4 and have a serial console attached.

    That's very interesting. I'd like to read more about this setup.

    Currently I'm unsure, whether to buy a rockpi again -

    but I have the towers and a really like the idea of such a small nas that is capable to act as media client ...

    The pi was in the living room connected to beamer, surround receiver and cable network. I connected via ssh from my desktop pc. That was ok for research. Only changing image was a pain.

    I never used network booting - where do I select the boot image?

    Does the client offer a listing of boot images like grub or so or do I have to change server setup to offer the client a new/different image?

    I guess, the latter would be handier, as I could change boot image without leaving desktop ;)