That darned power-off reset
When I set up my mini-computer, I made a few hardware choices due to my familiarity with the Linux operating system. My x86 boxes had uptimes of hundreds of days. With Raspian Jessie, and Raspbian in general, my uptimes are in days. Sometimes not even that.
There are A LOT of bugs in Raspbian. So many that I need to change to something completly different, or something a lot older and more stable.
My computer has a key switch for main power to the internal 5 VDC supply. The switch turns off/on the AC feeding the supply. I wired each Raspberry Pi to a power buss for the 5v. I didn't add any switches so that I could power up/down the computer modules seperately. And as long as I don't use the computer, it works just fine that way.
I use PI1 for development in writing software since running at 1.25 GHz it's the fastest of the 5. But when something goes wrong, I lose connectivity to the rest, and many times it won't even shut down. Just gives me error messages that init can't be found.
Normal process to power down the entire maching is ssh to each computer, do a sudo shutdown -h now and move on to the next board. When I get to #1 and it's halted, I turn off AC power. When AC power is turned back on, everything comes up as it should.
At this point I could ssh via one of the outside computers and bypass PI1. Sometimes that means I need to go to another room, PITA, so I just power down the whole thing.
If I need to reboot PI1 then all the computers using the big internal hard drives lose their hard drives because of the NFS filesystem mounts start from PI1. I need to move those to PI2, since I consider it production and don't generally put new, or untried software on it.
The other day I plugged in a USB radio (SDRPLAY) onto a powered usb hub external to the computer. PI1 dies a hard death. The kernel just showed an internal buss error and init stopped (!). Also a BUNCH of zombies popped up.
Fine. Shutdown. No. Without init, shutdown and darn near everything else died. X windows worked, but I couldn't launch any new programs and the network stack went away.
By the way, I've have more that 20 instances of the kernel just dying. It's the latest kernel as of 6/2016 but I suspect systemd has some issues with raspbian. Many of the programs installed from the repository are broken on install using apt-get install. Missing dependancies, wrong libraries, corrupted builds etc etc. It's like every major package is broken in multiple ways (LibreOffice will print once via CUPS then stop, and stay dead until a reboot. CUPS is so unreliable that I think it was copied from Windows ME. Lxpanel throws zombies every time it starts. The default web browser dies on the google home page. Repeatedly. And randomly. One day the wifi-router stopped and with in a day the memory swap space climbed to the max (2 GB), the load hit 20+ and hundreds of new files were created by a runaway lighthttpd process. Not to mention the /var/log files increased by 1.5 GB.
Anyway. Enough ranting. Raspbian is seriously broken such that it is not ready for prime-time.
Looking now at operating system choices that allow me to do multi-processing among multiple procesors and assign processes to individual cores at the user command.
-~-
There are A LOT of bugs in Raspbian. So many that I need to change to something completly different, or something a lot older and more stable.
My computer has a key switch for main power to the internal 5 VDC supply. The switch turns off/on the AC feeding the supply. I wired each Raspberry Pi to a power buss for the 5v. I didn't add any switches so that I could power up/down the computer modules seperately. And as long as I don't use the computer, it works just fine that way.
I use PI1 for development in writing software since running at 1.25 GHz it's the fastest of the 5. But when something goes wrong, I lose connectivity to the rest, and many times it won't even shut down. Just gives me error messages that init can't be found.
Normal process to power down the entire maching is ssh to each computer, do a sudo shutdown -h now and move on to the next board. When I get to #1 and it's halted, I turn off AC power. When AC power is turned back on, everything comes up as it should.
At this point I could ssh via one of the outside computers and bypass PI1. Sometimes that means I need to go to another room, PITA, so I just power down the whole thing.
If I need to reboot PI1 then all the computers using the big internal hard drives lose their hard drives because of the NFS filesystem mounts start from PI1. I need to move those to PI2, since I consider it production and don't generally put new, or untried software on it.
The other day I plugged in a USB radio (SDRPLAY) onto a powered usb hub external to the computer. PI1 dies a hard death. The kernel just showed an internal buss error and init stopped (!). Also a BUNCH of zombies popped up.
Fine. Shutdown. No. Without init, shutdown and darn near everything else died. X windows worked, but I couldn't launch any new programs and the network stack went away.
By the way, I've have more that 20 instances of the kernel just dying. It's the latest kernel as of 6/2016 but I suspect systemd has some issues with raspbian. Many of the programs installed from the repository are broken on install using apt-get install. Missing dependancies, wrong libraries, corrupted builds etc etc. It's like every major package is broken in multiple ways (LibreOffice will print once via CUPS then stop, and stay dead until a reboot. CUPS is so unreliable that I think it was copied from Windows ME. Lxpanel throws zombies every time it starts. The default web browser dies on the google home page. Repeatedly. And randomly. One day the wifi-router stopped and with in a day the memory swap space climbed to the max (2 GB), the load hit 20+ and hundreds of new files were created by a runaway lighthttpd process. Not to mention the /var/log files increased by 1.5 GB.
Anyway. Enough ranting. Raspbian is seriously broken such that it is not ready for prime-time.
Looking now at operating system choices that allow me to do multi-processing among multiple procesors and assign processes to individual cores at the user command.
-~-
Comments
Post a Comment