Eero, many thanks for the detailed response.
Am Montag, 8. Juni 2009 schrieben Sie: > 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? 5.2008.43-7 (should be latest greatest). > >> 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. navit is an open source navigation tool, it works on openstreetmap data and can do routing w/o being online: http://wiki.navit-project.org/index.php/Navit_on_n770/n800/n810 I should do a wiki page on different navigation tools on maemo, I remember that there are at least maemo-mapper, gosmore, navit, roadnav, and navicore. Is that the omap-wd which I could disable in R&D mode? > [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. Should be latest greatest OS. > > 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. I have homeDiskFree which shows free space on the disks as an applet. I have around 16 MB on the rootfs since weeks (and I still have it after it reboots now). I would be surprised if I run out of rootfs space. > 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. One thing I noticed and maybe I did not highlight that enough: -> yesterday in the boot loops, the N800 started itself after I plugged the powersupply (no matter if I removed the battery before or not). -> today plugging the power supply does not start the N800 anymore, just showing that it is charging the battery Under which circumstances is the N800 started automatically, when the power supply is plugged in? Thanks, Rainer -- Rainer Dorsch Lärchenstr. 6 D-72135 Dettenhausen 07157-734133 email: rdor...@web.de jabber: rdor...@jabber.org GPG Fingerprint: 5966 C54C 2B3C 42CC 1F4F 8F59 E3A8 C538 7519 141E Full GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
