Hi,
today I made an apt update/upgrade on my pocket reform / RK3588. After having done that the boot process stopps just before opening the login screen. There’s a black screen with a prompt in the upper left. The reform gets hot when I leave it untouched in this state for a while.
I can still start it from sd-card and I can mount the boot and root partition.
Does anybody have an idea on what to do to get back access to the machine?
Claus
I have run into the same issue with a BPI-CM4 I am running SID and it seems like the NVME is not seen. Kernel 6.18 I think. Boot stops at cryptsetup looking for the correct UUID. I could boot to SD card and tried chroot to fix the issue. I made the mistake of trying to update my u-boot on the EMMC and ended up soft bricking my system. (I ordered a CM4 io board to fix tomorrow)
Unfortunately I do not know the root cause. I feel like a module may be the issue.
I just tried to boot my pocket with imx , and I can put in the Luks password, it starts to boot, and then stops, with a blinking cursor in the upper left.
Anyone else?
Hi @habasud and welcome to the forum!
I have seen this issue with Debian Trixie. Are you using the official MNT mirrors or did you set up your system with the inofficial images from reform.debian.net?
Can you try pressing ctrl+alt+F5? You should get a login on a different tty and can run sway from there. Can you confirm?
If it does not contain personal information/packages, would you be willing to share the last entry of your /var/log/apt/history.log to see which packages got upgraded to let you get into that state?
If the nvm is not seen, then that’s a different issue than the boot process stopping before opening the login screen. We have seen your issue with latest u-boot on rk3588. Did you also just upgrade your system (like @habasud did) or did you actually upgrade your u-boot?
When you say “soft bricked” does this mean that you can no longer boot a system from an sd-card?
Do you have a uart adapter to look into the early boot messages? Your issue seems to be very different from the one that the original poster had. Maybe you should start a new topic about this?
Yes, me on rk3588. Are you with MNT package repositories or with reform.debian.net repos? With a fresh MNT system image I do not see the problem.
Yup also experiencing this problem after updating my pocket with rk3588 this morning. It did curiously have 600+ packages to update, despite me performing an update four or five days ago. I felt a little iffy about it but went for it anyway. Should have listened to my gut.
I can open another virtual tty session after i get to blinking cursor screen but it freezes within 10s. Most I can do is log in.
I am currently booting off SD card and chrooting in. With journalctl I can see the boot from this morning where I performed the update but none of the other five or so boots show up. I tried updating again while chrooted and there were two new packages available so I tried installing those but that did not fix anything. Usually when this happens to me on Debian Gnome its a gdm3 thing so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling that but again no luck.
Only sources I have are an unmodified /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mntre.sources and I haven’t added anything to the debian entry in /etc/apt/sources.list either.
I think I found the solution it looks like my fstab on the NVME drive has been reset to default. I don’t remember quite how it was setup before but I think I made a comment about it a few years ago.
Edit: Nope I’m wrong fstab intact. I cd’d into the nvme drive but then did nano /etc/fstab going back to the SD card.
josch:
Can you try pressing ctrl+alt+F5? You should get a login on a different tty and can run sway from there. Can you confirm?
I was able to get to a tty, but I was able to enter my username, but it stopped there, it didn’t present a password prompt.
I haven’t tried to change them at all. So whatever it is shipped with. .
I have gotten myself into the similar situation.
ctrl + alt + HYPER + 5 did not make any change for my case.
shigeru@mntpr-0:~$ sudo reform-check
I: Contents of /proc/device-tree/model: MNT Pocket Reform with i.MX8MP Module
I: `uname -a` output: Linux mntpr-0 6.18.5-mnt-reform-arm64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 6.18.5-1+reform20260117T144105Z (2026-01-1 aarch64 GNU/Linux
I: Version of linux-image-mnt-reform-arm64: 6.18.5-1+reform20260117T144105Z
I: Version of reform-tools: 1.83-2+reform20260117T111126Z+1
I: Version of system image: System Image v4: 2024-08-20
I: To retrieve the latest sysctl and keyboard firmware versions either install libxmlb-utils or install curl, xz-utils and libxml2-utils
I: Version of system controller firmware: 20251001
I: Version of keyboard firmware: 20251001
I: Version of LPC firmware: PREF1SYS R1 20251001
I: Version of upstream U-Boot: 2022.04
I: Version of MNT U-Boot: 2026-01-11
I: probably booting via /boot/boot.scr (/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf does not exist)
I: Mount source of /: /dev/reformvg/root (LVM vg 'reformvg' on LUKS device 'reform_crypt' on SSD)
I: Mount source of /boot: /dev/mmcblk2p1 (eMMC)
I: the following files differ from how they are shipped by reform-tools (ignore /var/lib/alsa/asound.state):
??5?????? /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
I: Install the package shellcheck for checking /boot/boot.scr for problems
I: kernel boot parameters your system does use but which are not the default:
+ console=ttymxc1,115200
I: eMMC contains the latest u-boot version 2026-01-11
I am accessing through SSH from other machine.
OK first instinct was correct. The problem is with gnome, and probably gdm3 49.2-3 because gdm is what always causes me problems. I accessed drive with chroot and uninstalled gdm3 which removed all of gnome and installed plasma-desktop and sddm3. Had to switch sddm from starting “default-session” to plasma-wayland. It’s not my preferred desktop but it will work. If I try and reinstall gnome now I get a bug report which was not there this morning “critical bugs of gdm3 (→ 49.2-3) b1 - #1125486 - gdm3: /tmp/.X11-unix/ owned by gdm-greeter, causes user session to fail to start grave bugs of gnome (→ 1:49+9)”
I couldn’t figure out how to rollback gdm3 and hold it. I added a file `/etc/apt/sources.list.d/rollback.list` and entered `deb https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/20251204T083236Z sid main contrib non-free non-free-firmware` to it. I made another file `/etc/apt/preferences.d/downgrade` and entered
`Package: gdm3
Pim: version 49.2-2
Pin-Priority: 1001`
When I apt update I get ``Err:3 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/20251204T083236Z sid Release
404 NOT FOUND [IP: 2a04:4e42:5::644 443]``
and ```Error: The repository ‘https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/20251204T083236Z sid Release’ does not have a Release file.
Notice: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.```
Not sure how to get past those, but I can also just use KDE until gnome is fixed.
The URL needs an adjustment. It should be:
https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20251204T083236Z
Hi josh,
I can’t switch to a console when booting has stopped. No response…
Shure I could post the apt history, but -as someone else wrote- a large number of packages was processed. So the list is long and by now gdm3 has already been identified as the possible cause.
And: I use the regular debian that came with the reform - nothing special.
By now i managed to log into sway using greetd. Im not very familiar with sway, but I can use the reform…
Did anyone successfuly rollback to gdm3 49.2-2? I wasn’t able to do this even with the suggested url.
I was able to rollback, but couldn’t get gnome to launch, might need to rollback a few more packages. I’m playing around with it now.
I tried KDE but it was buggy sddm upside down and not taking any attempts to rotate, not so bad but typing in firefox inverts the display as well. Sway works just fine.
Do you have this in your journalctl output?
Starting org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service - GNOME Shell on Wayland...
/usr/bin/gnome-shell: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libgjs.so.0: undefined symbol: __aarch64_ldadd4_acq_rel, version mozjs_140
org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=127/n/a
org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Failed to start org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service - GNOME Shell on Wayland.
org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
org.gnome.Shell-disable-extensions.service - Disable GNOME Shell extensions after failure was skipped because of an unmet condition check (ConditionPathExists=/run/user/60582/gnome-shell-disable-extensions).
Try downgrading libmozjs-140-0 to 140.6.0-1
Too late for me, got around it by downgrading everything to `https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20251209T023056Z` Everything seems to be working so far.
I have been able to boot from an SD card, and enable ssh, so I can work from another machine. Any idea where to go next with this?
Yes, that’s what I’ve seen when trying sddm. The screen was rotated 180°
Hi all,
Following Simon's instructions, last night I uploaded NMUs mozjs140
140.6.0-1.1 and gjs 1.86.0-3.1 to unstable. The bug should thus be fixed
in unstable now.
Cheers!
I’ll have a look soon… - worked!
I did the same, and was able to boot into the GUI! Now, I’ll update the rest.
I’m also suffering from the gdm black screen issue. Unfortunately after a few moments of gdm starting up the system appears to freeze and will no longer respond to keyboard input (internal or external keyboard). This freeze impacts tty5 as well so I’m not able to login to the system to attempt the update to fix gdm.
I’ll try to boot from an sdcard and chroot to the install on my nvme drive but I’m wondering if anyone else had the freezing issue and if there is something I might be able to do to fix it?