emmc is a mess. mostly when booting. sometimes it requires a few power cycles to get it to boot an os from emmc. some distros (armbian and dietpi) do not boot at all. suspect is that emmc does not initialize properly prior to attempting to boot os. drops to emergency shell. manjaro uboot does not have usb support baked in so you cannot use the emergency shell (unless you have a serial cable?).
today (2022-05-17) going to try going to older versions of u-boot. dsimic stated that complaints were received around 2021.10. i am going to try 2021.07-3 right now. lets see if the pinebook pro starts back up…
so after using 2021.07-3 the pinebook pro seems to boot far better than before. suspend is still a total mess but at least it can consistently boot without going through the 20 times of power cycling just to get the emmc to boot. i did run into moments where the booting would not work but mostly while trying to get s2idle or deep mem_sleep to work. neither works now. it defaults to deep in /sys/power/mem_sleep. when changing to s2idle manually then going to sleep the mousepad stops working. wtf.
at least it boots better now.
update: so i have been using the pinebook pro normally. it definitely boots better with 2021.07 u-boot but i still ran into a moment where xfce took a while to shut down then when i turned it back on (later in the day) it did not boot properly. it was stuck at a cannot find uuid screen. one reboot had it booting again. not really sure where things are getting lost here but it is happening. dsimic is working on u-boot to see if things can be improved but it is difficult to debug without more information (preferably using a serial cable that is on its way).
just another update: seems like long power off starts cause it to not boot. leaves you at the emergency shell screen being unable to find uuid of emmc partition. not really sure what that’s about. but it seems to occur more often when powered down for a while beforehand. at least with 2021.07 it only takes 1 power cycle to get it going again (unlike newer ones where you can power cycle like 10 times before you can finally boot again).