Custom ESP32-P4 board crashes with Watchdog Timeout

[Apostal2008]

I have designed a custom board using the ESP32-P4 chip. When running even the simplest example code (like a "Hello World" with a simple calculation loop printed to serial), the board consistently crashes with a Guru Meditation Error: Core 1 panic'ed (Interrupt wdt timeout on CPU1).

The program runs for a short time (a few thousand iterations of a simple loop on both cores) before the watchdog triggers. The crash consistently points to a timeout in the interrupt watchdog on CPU1.
Error Messages and Logs:
The primary error is the Interrupt WDT timeout. Below are the most relevant sections from the crash log, showing the panic origin and stack trace. Core 0 also dumps registers, but Core 1 is the one that panics.

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Guru Meditation Error: Core  1 panic'ed (Interrupt wdt timeout on CPU1).

Core  1 register dump:
MEPC    : 0x4ff05bde  RA      : 0x4ff086bc  SP      : 0x4ff116f0  GP      : 0x4ff0f100
--- 0x4ff05bde: rv_utils_get_core_id at C:/Espressif/esp-idf-v5.5.1/components/riscv/include/riscv/rv_utils.h:92
--- (inlined by) spinlock_release at C:/Espressif/esp-idf-v5.5.1/components/esp_hw_support/include/spinlock.h:188
--- (inlined by) vPortExitCriticalMultiCore at C:/Espressif/esp-idf-v5.5.1/components/freertos/FreeRTOS-Kernel/portable/riscv/port.c:553
--- 0x4ff086bc: xTaskIncrementTickOtherCores at C:/Espressif/esp-idf-v5.5.1/components/freertos/esp_additions/freertos_tasks_c_additions.h:125

Additionally, upon some reboots, I occasionally get a flash checksum failure:

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Checksum failure. Calculated 0x3b stored 0xb9
ets_main.c 347

Behavior with Watchdogs Disabled:

If I disable the watchdogs , the board does not reset. Instead, it simply hangs at a random iteration of the same simple loop, with no further output or activity.

Example of the hang point (last serial output):

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Core 0: x = 1.520047 (iter 62050)
Core 1: x = 1.520047 (iter 62000)

What systematic approach should I take now to isolate the root cause?

[mikemoy]

When running even the simplest example code (like a "Hello World" with a simple calculation loop

Without seeing you simple example code how can we know what is the problem ?

Did you put a delay in your loop? if not that would be more than likely the reason.

[Apostal2008]

So, the issue was with the crystal oscillator circuit — I used the wrong capacitor values. Once I corrected them, everything started working fine.