Sysupgrade of EA6350v3 no longer working

I'm using the master branch, and have built the software a few times and installed it. It's currently running OpenWRT.

I noticed that recent attempts to install a new sysupgrade are not booting, it is still using the old version (I am using the kernel version, 4.19.66 for the old version, and the new version is 4.19.69, as a flag to indicated which build it's running).

Is there any way to see why the new image is not booting, short of setting up a serial terminal? Also, I think the image name changed around this time, is it possible that this is causing a problem (like the boot block does not like something about the new name)? The commit in questions is:

commit 853e4dd3062df7cb5704b15d6af6730e3194b571
Author:
Date: Wed Aug 21 14:59:24 2019 -1000

Not saying this is an issue, just noting that this is a ipq4018 specific change.

Another one is

commit 94bf2e481338444df922f25cd61f7b45bd0c3842
Author:
Date: Fri Aug 23 19:38:29 2019 +0200

The image names should be identical, but the download paths might have changed with the generic subtarget being introduced for ipq40xx as well.

Also, please remove those e-mail addresses, you don't want those people getting spam. Very unpolite to leave them in your copy/paste. They don't contribute anything.

Good point, e-mail addresses removed.

I think the image names are slightly different, but that should not matter. I also tried to build a 19.04 snapshot and the same thing is happening.

I can see via 'Advanced Reboot' in LUCI, that the kernel version is getting updated for one of the partitions as I expect, but that partition is never booted, I keep going back to the same partition that I started with. I was able to do sysupgrades until the 24th and then lost that ability, apparently (the kernel messages have a date of the 24th, which I assume is the build time of the kernel, until it gets a date from the internet).

I will give my own spare EA6350 v3 a shot this weekend (it's running 19.07 builds though, not master). Could you try a 19.07 snapshot to see of that works?

https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/19.07-SNAPSHOT/targets/ipq40xx/generic/

Apparently sysupgrade has seen some changes which effectively mute any useful output that one would have seen on older versions, but I have no link to that discussion unfortunately.

Yeah, I can install the snapshot, but it doesn't boot to it. It appears to spit out the right stuff before rebooting. I seem to be stuck with a particular version of 'master' with no way to get off of it. Is there some way to manually change the partition? Right now I think it's stuck with the alternate partition, and uploads are going to the primary each time.

That is a side effect of detached sysupgrades, which pivot_root into a initramfs like environment before starting the sysupgrade - a side effect sadly is that all running ssh sessions are torn down by this. The full output of the sysupgrade only remains visible via serial console.

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The "advanced reboot" LuCI package will let you control the next-boot partition. You can also do it manually with

fw_setenv boot_part 1

(or 2)

You can mount and examine the other partition as described in Script: Mount "Alternate" NAND Firmware (Linksys +?)

Have you ever had OpenWrt installed on the "other" partition? There might be some subtle issues with how the OEM firmware has set up the UBI volumes.

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There doesn't appear to be a 'fw_setenv' installed, which would definitely screw things up...

Yes, that it would!

If missing, that would explain a lot, since target/linux/ipq40xx/base-files/lib/upgrade/linksys.sh contains

        case "$cur_boot_part" in
        1)
                fw_setenv -s - <<-EOF
                        boot_part 2
                        auto_recovery yes
                EOF
                printf "alt_kernel"
                return
                ;;
        2)
                fw_setenv -s - <<-EOF
                        boot_part 1
                        auto_recovery yes
                EOF
                printf "kernel"
                return
                ;;
        *)
                return
                ;;
        esac

The executables and supporting data are available in uboot-envtools

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I was able to install the 'uboot-envtools' package and get it working again. Not sure how it got deselected in the first place...

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