Gareth Halfacree

As I can see, which is why I am making sure to move away from Armbian - and I recommend anyone reading this to do the same. It's simply not a project you can rely upon for daily use. For messing around with as a hobbyist, sure, why not. But to actually rely upon? Impossible. Especially when the founder doesn't understand that bug reports - especially bug reports from beta/nightly users, which have been specifically requested right here in this thread - have value to the project. With an attitude like that, Armbian will never become anything more than a hobbyist's curiosity. I'll repeat for clarity, so others reading this thread don't misunderstand my meaning: this is going to keep happening. Future updates will continue to break the Helios64, and other devices, and there is nothing you can do about it. Armbian, as Igor says, simply doesn't have the resources to properly test its updates before release, much less actually respond to bug reports. You will not be able to rely on it to keep your Helios64 running and your data safe. If you're happy with that, by all means continue to use it; otherwise, I'd advise looking into alternative software and/or moving to a new NAS altogether.

Oh, I've tried reporting problems. Igor told me (and many, many others) that if I wasn't paying €50 a month to Armbian he wasn't interested, so I stopped.

No, the storage is fine - Armbian 21.08.1 is yet another update that hoses something on the Helios64. Last time it was the fans, the time before that the 2.5Gb Ethernet port (twice), and this time it's the eMMC. You'll need to follow the instructions upthread to downgrade the kernel to get the eMMC working again. Then cross your fingers it gets fixed at some point in the future.

If anyone has installed the update but *not* rebooted, it's a quick (temporary) fix: sudo apt install linux-dtb-current-rockchip64=21.05.4 linux-headers-current-rockchip64=21.05.4 linux-image-current-rockchip64=21.05.4

Another month, another big batch of DRDY errors as the btrfs scrub runs.

I'd suggest getting one or more drives, setting them up in a btrfs mirror, dding a bunch of random onto them, and scrubbing. It's possible dding alone will trigger the error, but if it doesn't then scrubbing certainly should. $ sudo mkfs.btrfs -L testdisks -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/sdX /dev/sdY /dev/sdZ $ sudo mkdir /media/testdisks $ sudo chown USER /media/testdisks $ sudo mount /dev/sdX /media/testdisks -o user,defaults,noatime,nodiratime,compress=zstd,space_cache $ cd /media/testdisks $ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/media/testdisks/001.testfile bs=10M count=1024 $ for i in {002..100}; do cp /media/testdisks/001.testfile /media/testdisks/$i.testfile; done $ sudo btrfs scrub start -Bd /media/testdisks The options on the mount are set to mimic my own. Obviously change the number and name of the devices and the username to match your own. It's also set to create 100 files of 10GB each for a total of 1TB of data; you could try with 10 files for 100GB total first to speed things up, but I've around a terabyte of data on my system so figured it was worth matching the real-world scenario as closely as possible.

It's the first of the month, so another automated btrfs scrub took place - and again triggered a bunch of DRDY drive resets on ata2.00. Are we any closer to figuring out what the problem is, here?

For anyone visiting from Twitter and wondering what the fuss is about, you can find the split thread here.

The key upgrade for me would be moving away from Armbian to a professional distribution like mainstream Ubuntu or Debian.

@gprovost Thanks, I really appreciate it. The commands ran without error, though I won't truly know if it's worked until the next reboot!

@Igor I've seen you post the same copy-and-paste message to others, and I remain as unimpressed now as the first time I saw it. I'm not asking you, nor Armbian, for support, here: I'm asking Kobol, to whom I have paid money for a commercial product with support, to assist me. If you want to help me, feel free; if not, kindly leave Kobol and its appointed representatives to the task. I'll be honest: if I'd know about your user-hostile attitude before pre-ordering the Helios64, I wouldn't have ordered it at all - I'd have bought something that ran plain-Jane Ubuntu instead. It's certainly put me off using Armbian in the future, and I'm only still here because I don't want the money I've spent on the Helios64 to be wasted. @gprovost Thanks for offering your assistance. Here's the output: Everything should be pretty standard, except I increased the zram log partition size because I have a server running which generates quite a lot of log data over time.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work either - and may provide a hint as to why there's no option to install from armbian-config. If I run nand-sata-install, I get a message reading "This tool must be run from SD-card!" - which, of course, it's not, it's being run from the SATA SSD. Is there a way to update the bootloader without taking the system down, booting from an SD card, updating the bootloader, removing the SD card, and rebooting back into the installed operating system again? Because that's a bit of a slog, especially if the bootloader's going to need regular updates...

My Helios64 has been booting from an M.2 drive since I got it, and while I've been doing regular apt-upgrades I've been ignoring the bootloader. This post suggests that could be a problem, so I figured I'd upgrade the bootloader through armbian-config. Trouble is, I can't. I can load armbian-config without error, but when I go into System there's no Install option any more. All I have are Freeze, Nightly, Lowlevel, Bootenv, CPU, Avahi, Hardware, Other, SSH, Firmware, ZSH, Default. Is there another way to ensure the bootloader is up-to-date?

Your MicroServer has either an Opteron or Ryzen processor in it, either one of which is considerably more powerful than the Arm-based RK3399. As a quick test, I ran OpenSSL benchmarks for AES-256-CBC on my Ryzen 2700X desktop, an older N54L MicroServer, and the Helios64, block size 8129 bytes. Helios64: 68411.39kB/s. N54L: 127620.44kB/s. Desktop: 211711.31kB/s. From that, you can see the Helios64 CPU is your bottleneck: 68,411.39kB/s is about 67MB/s, or within shouting distance of your 62MB/s real-world throughput - and that's just encryption, without the LZ4 compression overhead.

The UUID itself is a universally unique identifier - that's what UUID means, after all. There are a wide range of scenarios where public knowledge of the UUID could be a problem, all absolutely vanishingly unlikely - think things like "state-level actors falsifying evidence about what data they found on a system and using their knowledge of the drive's UUID as 'proof' that the evidence was legitimately collected instead of just made up from whole cloth." Given it takes a whopping four seconds to elide the UUID, and absence of the UUID has zero impact on diagnosing the problem, why wouldn't I keep it private? Back on topic: I still haven't rebooted since the update. Would I be safe to do so, or shall I keep on truckin' until we're closer to figuring out the root cause of the issue?