Hi,
ext Rainer Dorsch wrote:
>> my N800 crashed after running navit. During the reboot, the blue bar
>> completed, then it paused sometime and it rebooted again. This now cycles
>> so that the N800 is doing nothing else than power cycling.
With which OS version this is?
>> Is there a better way to fix that than reflashing the device?
For normal users, no.
>> Is there a way to find out what the root cause of the problem is?
If the device eventually boots up and you had syslog installed and
free disk space, then yes. Otherwise you'd need serial access.
>> Can R&D mode help to be more verbose during the boot process?
>>
>
> Weired, after waiting a few hours and booting the N800 w/o a power cable, it
> booted again.
In this case I assume the reason for the boot loop was that "navit"
(what is that?) "trashed" your rootfs contents in a very fragmented way
so that JFFS2 mounting[1] took too long (>1/2min without kicking
the watchdog) & triggered the HW watchdog.
[1] The reason why I asked about OS version is that in very old releases
JFFS2 garbage collecting could also happen at mount time which could
take a lot of time. In later releases it's postponed.
> Are there any logs which show what went wrong before?
>
> Can I do something to better protect myself against such "boot loops"?
Avoid SW that can fill your rootfs, runs as root and doesn't
have proper error handling for disk writes (remove data if
disk fills up, have strict limits on log etc file sizes etc).
If something *running as root* fills the rootfs, your device
is in boot-loop and needs to be reflashed.
Explanation:
The device needs a small amount of free space at bootup (JFFS2 needs
some space even to remove data), otherwise it doesn't boot. There
should be enough allocated for "root" for this purpose ("user" cannot
fill it, only root can). However if a bad process running as root is
installed that fills disk, or *anything* you install (installation
happens as root) has badly behaving package install scripts, you can
get screwed.
Because this kind of issue may happen e.g. only in an uncommon
error situations, normal testing might not catch them.
Everything pre-installed to the device should behave fine, but
3rd party packages can do funny things. I'd suggest taking
backups at least before installing something that's not widely
used.
- Eero
_______________________________________________
maemo-developers mailing list
maemo-developers@maemo.org
https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
