Lillipup not booting any Linux distro

hylianux · March 17, 2025, 3:58pm

Hey all,

I’ve successfully booted my Lillipup (Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 13ITL6) into UEFI full ROM and replaced the battery connection. My issue now is that any Linux distro I try is unsuccessful. I’ve tried:

Ubuntu 24.04.2
xubuntu 24.04.2
Debian 12.10
Fedora Workstation x86_64 v41
Fedora XFCE x86_64 v41
Archlinux 2025.03.01-x86_64
pop-os 22.04 amd64

I’m flashing to a USB using balenaEtcher on my Macbook. The error message changes depending on the distro, for example:

Fedora XFCE shows:

mmc0: Timeout waiting for hardware interrupt

Followed by a constant "Job lvm2-monitor.service/start running ( Xmin Xs / no limit)

Arch shows:

mmc0: PLL clock never stabilised.

It then just sits here until I reboot

Pop! OS also shows:
mmc0: Timeout waiting for hardware interrupt.
< an SDHCI Register dump >

Then it eventually goes to another screen and the last line says “future hung task repots are suppressed”

Eventually after all that I tried booting Pop_OS from a micro SD card, also flashed from balenaEtcher. This is one that I’ve used on my Raspberry Pi with no problems. It also showed “mmc0: Timeout waiting for hardware interrupt.” followed by an SDHCI register dump

I’ve googled around and found others facing similar issues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrultrabook/comments/13iydpr/mmc0_timeout_waiting_for_hardware_interrupt/

github.com/MrChromebox/firmware

Lenovo Flex 5i (LILLIPUP) Unable to boot from eMMC with UEFI 4.19

opened 07:58PM - 28 Mar 23 UTC

TheFeshy

After following the instructions to flash the UEFI, and installing Debian 11.6, …rebooting gives me the message: `Booting from 'debian' failed; verify it contains a 64-bit UEFI OS. Press any key to continue booting...` This is identical to the problem discussed at the bottom of the closed issue #397, but since that issue provided the whole UEFI image, I thought it might be easier to track as a new issue for this smaller problem. I can confirm that this device does not show up on the EFI shell's map. The bootloader is looking for the path `HD(3,GPT,5D708219-005C-D745-99FA-AC3F7D6E5B69,0X800,0X80000)/EFI/Debian/shimx64.efi` but not only is this not found in the map, but nothing is. If I leave my install USB thumb drive in, the shell will detect those and populate the map (fs0:, fs1:, etc.) But there is no sign of the eMMC, and if I leave the USB stick unplugged, the map is completely empty. My model of LILLIPUP has the 64GiB eMMC, and it appears to be a 2242 PCIe card, like an NVMe. It's driven by a GL9763E chip, which seems to be a PCI to eMMC controller? I can see that Coreboot should have support for this chip (there is code for it [in their repo](https://elixir.bootlin.com/coreboot/4.19/source/src/drivers/genesyslogic/gl9763e/gl9763e.c)), but the drive is not found at boot. I should also say that linux kernels 5.18 and later _also_ fail to handle this drive properly - I get the message `PLL clock never stabilised.` followed by other error messages depending on linux version. 5.18 is the kernel version that added this message, with [this](https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/3/7/188) patch. I haven't done a kernel bisect yet, but I have confirmed that that is the version where this issue begins. Issues with two different drivers (UEFI and linux) would normally make me think hardware failure - but the drive worked fine in chromeos, and it works fine in Debian (still on kernel 5.10) Long term, the answer for me is to replace it with an NVME (hopefully the slot is properly plumbed for that), but I also wanted to document it here in case anyone else either had the same problem or had found a solution.

The github link indicates replacing the eMMC with an nvme drive is the solution. While I could spend the $30 and replace it, I’d rather just put ChromeOS back on it since this laptop was a hand me down that I grabbed just to mess around and learn Linux.

This is my first experience with Linux so I’m just trying to see if there’s something I’m missing with flashing the iso or if this eMMC drive is the culprit.

This also brings me to my final point, if I can’t even boot Linux from the USB I’m not sure how to recover to ChromeOS.

hylianux · March 17, 2025, 4:19pm

I should say Debian and either Ubuntu or xubuntu went into a GUI to begin the installation only for it to eventually get hung up at (I think) a detecting or verifying disks or similar (I can’t remember the exact language but if its helpful I can re-attempt).

However based on other distro failures I would guess that these are also getting hung at the same point (when attempting to access the eMMC)

hylianux · March 24, 2025, 9:31pm

Decided to just bite the bullet and found a cheap m.2 SSD 2242, booted up no issues and am currently installing xubuntu 22.04.02 without a hitch thus far