start.elf Regression: vchiq has no connection to VideoCore

[KyleSanderson]

Issue 123 has regressed and unfortunately made me pull out my laptop to save my Pi. Using rpi-update seemed to brick my Pi, rolling start.elf back to commit 8e9fd63 seems to have fixed it. I haven't tried any other commits (Commit f53948f looks troublesome), besides manually copying firmware files to the SD card after rpi-update left me in an unusable state.

[popcornmix]

It's very unlikely that the rpi-update firmware is broken (there would be far more reports if it were).
I think your image may have become broken.
I'd suggest you:

sudo rm /boot/.firmware_revision && sudo rpi-update

and if that fails, try installing a new raspbian image, and then try rpi-update, which I believe will work.

[KyleSanderson]

Ah I see what happened. I changed the GPU memory size to 24M which seemed to halt the initialization process at the beginning of the loop. Older firmware seems to work with lower sizes (?) whereas newer firmwares seem to arbitrarily freeze.

[popcornmix]

Can you confirm if this is still an issue for you?

[KyleSanderson]

It is still an issue for me. I hit this again about a month ago, cursed rather loudly, pulled out my laptop to rollback to a stable version. Cold Booting is what seems to trigger it.

[popcornmix]

Does it only happen with gpu_mem=24?
Note that any gpu_mem < 32 will use the cutdown kernel which doesn't support most vchiq services.
What exactly are you running to see this message? I don't believe vchiq is required for a normal boot.
Can you try with gpu_mem=32?

[cleverca22]

back when i was working on device-tree support, i found that the kernel refuses to boot without a working mailbox

the issue was in https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/rpi-3.10.y/arch/arm/mach-bcm2708/power.c

it would write to the mailbox, then call read, and dead-lock
the irq to release a lock never fired, so the read function just hung, it never even got to /sbin/init

the exact same kernel would boot fine if i set config.txt to use atags, but fail if it was set to device-tree mode

[popcornmix]

Yes, mailbox is required (but that will be present cutdown kernel) to boot linux.
I believe vchiq isn't required.

[popcornmix]

Closing due to lack of response.
If still an issue, please reopen with answer to previous question.