Up Board B10 Versions do not seem to be backwards compatible to the A11

david

I have an application that boots from a USB thumb drive (easier for production to flash the drives than the boards from an image), but when i put one of the thumb drives into the B10 unit, it never boots, it just keeps resetting (tested drive on A11, it works fine). is this a fault of the USB modifications made to the board, or is this a result of using an image that was originally created on the A11? if its an image issue, will i have to maintain 2 separate images, one for the B10 and one for the A11?

camillus

Hi @david,

Can you share more details of the image backup and restore, and I am not sure I understand what you mean by the B10 unit keeps resetting when you insert the thumb drive please explain

JSera3

I am having a similar issue, we are a manufacturer using the boards in a buildroot environment. We are able to flash an image to the board, but the boards do not interface with a WiFi adapter we are using that works just fine with the A11 boards. Are there any drivers available for the chips that changed between the A11 and B10?

david

so normally, with the A11's, i unpack the board, install it in my product, put in a USB thumb drive that has had an ubuntu image burned onto it (created from installing ubuntu onto a USB drive on an up board, then copying the image thats on the USB drive onto a separate linux box, and using that image to burn more thumb drives), and power up the system. everything works fine. When i do the same process for the B10, it never boots. if i plug a monitor into the system, I can see that it just keeps displaying the blue UP splash screen, then going dark, and repeat, never booting linux.

I have tried this on the B10 with fresh install of ubuntu server 18.04.02 and 22.04, and the same thign happens.

The A11's (even the ones i just got from you a week or 2 ago) have bios version upc1dm21, the B10s have upc1dm25. I have been looking closer at what happens on a fresh start, and it is this:

on the A11: power up, uses the UEFI partition to try to boot, fails, uses the uefi partition to try to boot, but now has the main ubuntu partition as a boot option, fails, then uses the main ubuntu partition to try to boot, and succeeds. from this point, if the battery is connected, it will try to boot from the main ubuntu partition and will succeed, and if the battery is disconnected, it will do what it does the first time and eventually succeed.

on the B10: power up, uses the UEFI partition to try to boot, fails, and keeps failing forever. after the second or third time, it will show the main ubuntu partition in the boot options, but never automatically switches to it to boot. if i manually switch it, it will then boot, and continue to do so, unless the battery is disconnected, at which point it does the first thing over and over again since the memory for the bios has been wiped by removing battery.

in the end product, the batteries will eventually die, and because of how they are buried in the final product it is very hard to switch the battery out, so it needs to be able to figure out how to boot on its own without the battery.

SO, can you either
A) fix the bios
send me the upc1dm21 version of the bios to try on the B10 and see if that will fix it (i cannot find it anywhere on the web, just 25, 11, and i think 18)
C) tell me how to permanently etch into the firmware to boot from the ubuntu main partition instead of the UEFI with the need for the battery to be attached, if possible
D) give me another solution that will work better that i do not know about but you do

thanks very much

I believe it to be a BIOS issue reading the USB, because i can see in the boot options, it reads a valid UEFI partition form the USB

camillus

Hi @david ,

Thanks for the detailed explanation, we will try to replicate this issue. Meanwhile here is a link to the UPC1DM21 BIOS.

david

so i am trying to boot into the EFI shell, to do the bios roll back, but i cannot get it as an option (this imght be related to the other issues i am having with this bios) on a Mac, i formatted a 16G usb thumbdrive to fat 32, copied the 4 files onto it, like this guide says https://github.com/up-board/up-community/wiki/Firmware then i plug the usb device into the upboard and power on, the only boot option I am given is "USB Device: UEFI: USB Partition 1" and when it is selected, it just reboots and brings me back to the setup window. it never gives me a prompt for the UEFI shell, and i cannot seem to access it from the normal bios menus. on the guide i have referenced above, it has a note about an engineering password to protect the crb settings, so I tried putting that in, and was able to get to the CRB setup menus. However, whenever i select the "launch efi shell from filesystem device", i get a "not found" error. on the right side of the menu, it says it it looking to launch a file called shell.efi, which is not in the efi zip package. I have tried with 2 different USB devices, and with and without an OS installed, cannot get to the EFI shell. please help me

camillus

Hi @david,

I think I know why, it was missing the EFI file. I have updated the file now, please try again. BIOS