Re: [pandaboard] Ubunto 12.04 Pandaboard ES stability?

[Rolf Reintjes]

Am 26.07.2012 16:03, schrieb wb666...@gmail.com:
> Am I the only one finding the Pandaboard ES to not be very stable? I
> get random lockups, I think my longest uptime is about 30 hours.
>

It may be there are some hints for you here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pandaboard/VHFD9jj7xDQ

My stability problems were caused by a damaged SD-card. With my new
SD-card I do not have any problems. But I only run the pandaboard as a
server.

[Dan MacDonald]

Hi wb666greene!

I dunno if you spotted Xavier reply to me earlier:

-------------------------------------------------------------

One remark also, I can see that you are using bootargs: ro elevator=noop vram=40M mem=456M@0x80000000 mem=512M@0xA0000000 root=LABEL=pandadisk fixrtc quiet splash

vram parameter is no more needed, you shall replace "vram=40M mem=456M@0x80000000 mem=512M@0xA0000000" by "mem=1G@0x80000000"

You will also need "console=ttyO2,115200n8" and need to remove "quiet" for console output.

-------------------------------------------------------------

So have you checked your kernel boot args?

I'm not totally sure if this has cured my freezes and black-outs just yet although I can tell you the new boot arg does seem to be working fine for me- the old one is default in Canonical 12.04 - you can check yours in /var/log/syslog

Dan

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 3:03 PM, <wb666...@gmail.com> wrote:

Am I the only one finding the Pandaboard ES to not be very stable?  I get random lockups, I think my longest uptime is about 30 hours.

For anyone planning a media center or security system application this would seem to be a showstopper.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 Precise armhf release, with all updates (as of yesterday).  I've not found the TI-PPA 3.4.0-1485 kernel to be any better or worse than the 3.2.0 offerings from Ubuntu as far as stability is concerned.  But the TI-PPA 3.4.0-1485 kernel and omap4 updates definitely improve the user interaction and the ability of a program to execute a millisecond interval periodic task (as root).

I've had no luck at all running the Linero 12.06 image or anything earlier that the Ubuntu 12.04 armhf release.

Is this perhaps a Pandaboard vs. Pandaboard ES issue?  I believe our Pandaboard ES are all the Rev B1 hardware.

Using Unity 2D vs. LXDE vs. Xubuntu seems to make no difference other than only Unity  can give a video resolution better than 1024x768 on my Dell 1600x1200 LCD display, and it only goes to 1280x1024. 

The Hyundai 1920x1200 panel I tried gives a black display or runs un-synchronized (wavy, noisy images), although the "verification" image tests all worked fine on it when I first got the Pandaboard ES as did an Android 4.03 image I tried.

However, a Dell 1920x1080 panel seems to run fine with LXDE at 1920x1080 resolution (haven't tried the others as LXDE is the fastest to boot and use).  I'll leave it running on this for a while to see if perhaps the lockups are screen resolution related as it seems to me there be bugs where screen resolution is concerned, as its been a long time since I've had a Linux system that had issues with automatically displaying 1600x1200 on a 1600x1200 LCD monitor.

I apologize if this ends up posted twice, seems Google Groups is acting wonky this morning :(

[Dan MacDonald]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 4:49 PM, <wb666...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is definitely worth a try,  let me see if I've got this correct on how to do it,

I edit /boot/boot.script and change the setenv bootargs line and then run:  sudo flash-kernel

Yep, thats correct

I did it and rebooted, seems to have worked.

Good, but it hasn't fixed my crashes - looks like I may have to free my Panda to access the UART! :/
 

Problem is, this stuff is so dynamic its hard to track down what might have fixed/broken something :( 
Fortunately the fixing generally happens a lot more often than the breaking :)

There were 13 updates this morning, many involving PVR and x11 packages.  Time will tell if things are better or not.

Thanks for the reply, I did miss its significance the first time

[Rob Clark]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 12:57 PM, <wb666...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thursday, July 26, 2012 9:14:26 AM UTC-5, Rolf Reintjes wrote:

>>
>> Am 26.07.2012 16:03, schrieb :
>> > Am I the only one finding the Pandaboard ES to not be very stable? I
>> > get random lockups, I think my longest uptime is about 30 hours.
>> >
>>
>> It may be there are some hints for you here:
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pandaboard/VHFD9jj7xDQ
>>
>> My stability problems were caused by a damaged SD-card. With my new
>> SD-card I do not have any problems. But I only run the pandaboard as a
>> server.
>
>

> After reading that thread, it looks like a hardware problem -- either
> OMAP4/Pandaboard hardware related or the fact that SD cards make a poor
> excuse for a hard drive.
>
> Uptimes of 17 and 34 days (longest I'd seen mentioned in the thread) is
> totally unimpressive. Since about RedHat 6 my Linux uptimes, on the
> cheapest x86 hardware I could find, has always been limited by the power
> company or when I upgraded software.
>
> My wife's Android phone locks up every month or so and needs the battery
> removed and re-installed to reboot it.
>
> For a personal project I was looking at buying a Pandaboard for a security
> alarm application (currently running on my home Linux based file server with
> the idea of getting much longer run time on the UPS batteries with a
> Pandaboard compared to my quad core server with 6TB of hard drives), but
> uptimes of 34 days just won't cut it, as its a set and forget application.
>
> We'll see if the updated and changes made today will improve this Pandaboard
> ES uptime -- its mostly just idle to get and idea of uptime for the time
> being, others are being used for prototype development and the lockups are a
> PITA but not a showstopper for this purpose.
>
> Any but got better uptimes? Running off a USB drive or SSD?

I've got 33 days at the moment on my xorg tinderbox build client
panda.. uses an SSD drive on USB, but mainly to improve build times.
The last time it was rebooted was due to network issues (basically my
router box died, and I unplugged the panda in the process of
untangling power cords). That is a fedora 17 setup, with vanilla
upstream kernel.

Most of my other pandas get rebooted a bit more frequently (like many
times a day.. because usually I'm working on kernel driver stuff ;-)).
My xbmc panda was probably running at least for a few months straight
w/ 11.10 setup although I never noted the uptime before upgrading it
to 12.04. At the moment, there is a lot that is new in the 12.04
based gfx/multimedia stack, and still a few things that we are
debugging.. I wouldn't expect it to be the model of stability at the
moment, although most of those issues you wouldn't see if you weren't
using gfx/multimedia. (And we've fixed a lot of issues in the last
couple weeks, so the state of the 12.04 PPA should be improving as the
updates land in the PPA.) But if you want rock solid stability, I'd
still probably build a kernel with pwr mgmt disabled.. that eliminates
a lot of potential points of failure, and it will still draw quite a
lot less power than your desktop ;-)

Fwiw, I mainly use hard drives, rather than rootfs on sd-card.. but
for reasons of performance. I guess SD card should be ok, but I'd
probably recommend using tmpfs for /tmp and /var/log and any other
areas that are getting frequent writes. That would be a lot kinder to
the SD card.

BR,
-R

[Lioric]

Have you traced what causes the hangs? It might well be a memory leak,
a temp issue (not enough air flow) or something else

Anyway, have you enabled a watchdog? as far as I know OMAP has
hardware whatchdogs, so even if it hangs each month, it will be
automatically reset to a working state

Lioric