I have an Odroid HC2 with an Exynos 5422 8-core processor running Armbian Buster. When I perform a computational task that loads all the cores to close to 100% (in my case, pigz, which is a multithreaded gzip), the entire system locks up after a fairly short while, to the point where it won’t even respond on the UART bus. The only way I’ve been able to fix it is to pull the plug and plug it back in.

I also tested the system with a four-core load, but it’s fine. It seems that it only has a problem when all 8 cores are pinned at near 100%.

I don’t think it’s running out or memory, but I’ve seen the chip temperature get to a maximum of almost 120 C, though I would have assumed it would thermal throttle if it got to hot instead of just crashing, especially since it’s a mobile chip.

I’m running Armbian 21.02.3 Buster with Linux 4.14.222-odroidxu4, which is the latest release for my board. Has any experienced something similar? Anyone know what might be causing it or how to prevent it? One thing of note is that the Exynos chip is designed for (fairly old versions of) Android and has four high power and four low power cores. Not sure if that’s relevant, but maybe it’s being caused by Armbian not knowing how to deal with this kind of processor?