jcorbet Posted January 24, 2019 Posted January 24, 2019 Hi community, I am a newbie when it comes to SBCs and Armbian, but I will do my best to thoroughly explain the problem. Problem: Armbian (Ubuntu 18.04 based, release for HC-1) Despite me rebooting a zillion times, resizing does not happen/finish/...: Error message (displayed exactly like this): Warning: a reboot is needed to finish resizing the filesystem Please reboot the system as soon as possible ilesystem Please reboot the system as soon as possible Hardware: SBC: Odroid HC-1 2GB RAM (known working) Storage: 1GB SD Card|250GB SSD (I know the SD is tiny, but I do not want to use it for anything else but booting|root shall be migrated to the ssd via armbian-config) - SSD and SD are both known working, SD has already been tested with h2w What I have already done: http://ix.io/1z6Z (Output of the diagnostic utility provided) Trying to free as much space on the SD as I can (because I suspected it might have to do with the size of the SD) - down to 690k by removing localization/other unused stuff Trying multiple CLI commandos to initialize resize but to no avail. Can you suggest me any solutions or even helpful links? Any help is appreciated. I really want to make this work :D Best jcorbet
Igor Posted January 24, 2019 Posted January 24, 2019 3 hours ago, jcorbet said: http://ix.io/1z6Z (Output of the diagnostic utility provided) Can you do it again. It's clearly wrong.
jcorbet Posted January 25, 2019 Author Posted January 25, 2019 New Upload Hi, I hope this helps. I am very irritated that it displays January 19th as logdate. What I have done to obtain it is use armbian-config and then System/3rd Party -Diagnostics. Best Julian
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 Hi, can someone point me towards the next best thing to try out? I would really like to advance my understanding of this problem If you need more data I can run every test that you like. Best Julian
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 I will start to list all the commands I have tried to resolve the problem here: systemctl start armbian-resize-filesystem (run as root) - no visible output, does not seem to change anything /usr/lib/armbian/armbian-resize-filesystem - ran the script there with the parameter start. Did not work either. I am now reading the comments in the script to understand what it does and what my options are :). Any help however at this point would be very appreciated since I think it might be a problem with the software and not with my install alone. Maybe we can fix it together for future users. //Edit 1: Seems Armbian does not expect a usecase as with the HC-1: # check device capacity. If 4GB or below do not use whole card but leave a 5% spare area # to help older cards with wear leveling and garbage collection. In case this reduced card # capacity is less than the actual image capacity this is a clear sign that someone wants # to use Armbian on a card of inappropriate size so he gets what he deserves (at least he # should know what he's doing) But it does make sense to use a 1GB SD Card if you are just using it to boot but the rootfs is on the SSD, right? So the SSD handles the "real" computing while the SD just serves as an initial image to install on the SSD. Or is there any misunderstanding here on my side? If so, ideally it would make 2 partitions, so that I can resize the boot partition afterwards. (and delete the old rootfs). Can I somehow achieve this with armbian? # if SD card is larger than 4GB then create another partition behind first one(s) So this means, armbian will never attempt to create a boot partition in my case, right? I still do not understand the script but I can read the comments
Igor Posted January 26, 2019 Posted January 26, 2019 System works as expect. Your SD card was expanded to its max size. 179 0 995328 mmcblk1 179 1 991232 mmcblk1p1 3 hours ago, jcorbet said: If so, ideally it would make 2 partitions, so that I can resize the boot partition afterwards. (and delete the old rootfs). Can I somehow achieve this with armbian? It's already ideally. Armbian has one partition by default. If your rootfs was transferred to SSD, simply forget about and use computer for whatever you plan. Only boot loader and boot script is loaded from SD card and writing is what kills SD cards. Not reading.
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 Ok. Have tried it. Error message also gone. Shoudl hopefully work now. Thank you for the clarification PS: Since SD is small - will I have problems with kernelupdates in the future? I plan to use the serverfor ~4-5 years. Can I manually erase the old rootfs files after the transfer? Or is this done automatically and everything is OK? Sorry, for all the confusion I might be causing. When editing the fstab I noticed that only /boot is mounted. So I can erase everything else from /media/mmcboot, right?
Igor Posted January 26, 2019 Posted January 26, 2019 33 minutes ago, jcorbet said: Since SD is small - will I have problems with kernelupdates in the future? This questions is hard to answer since your already borderline SD card might not survive more than 2-3 kernel updates. It's writing with also lots of small files (modules). 33 minutes ago, jcorbet said: When editing the fstab I noticed that only /boot is mounted. So I can erase everything else from /media/mmcboot, right? Yes, but leave it inside fstab otherwise you will not be able to properly update kernel.
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 Ok. I see. So what one ought to do is disable resizing (systemctl disable armbian-resize-filesystem on first boot) in order to maximize spare SD size for the controller to be able to survive. Then you clone it to SSD with armbian-config. Then you have everything deleted but /boot. Then you enjoy SSD speed and surviving SD with enough space for kernel update. Correct way of doing this in the future?
Igor Posted January 26, 2019 Posted January 26, 2019 5 minutes ago, jcorbet said: disable resizing Check documentation, existing ideas for changes https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/1144. I also wrongly assumed that modules are on SD card, but they are actually on the SSD once transfer is done. This means only DTB, kernel image and ramdisk are written at update (/boot/ directory). That's not that critical. ... don't worry
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 Thank you. Really. And everyone who contributes to this software obviously
martinayotte Posted January 26, 2019 Posted January 26, 2019 14 minutes ago, jcorbet said: Then you enjoy SSD speed and surviving SD with enough space for kernel update. Looking at schematic of Odroid-HC1, I see it has a MX25L512E SPIFlash, so, if it is populated, it maybe possible to have U-Boot in this flash, and all other files from SSD ...
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 Okay. Can I help in any way? What commands shall I run/what outputs shall I generate? As I own the hardware maybe I can give back by providing information/testing software Found this when googling: https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot/tree/odroidxu4-v2017.05 (XU4 is the "same" hardware as HC-1) However I just started out with SBCs so I am really not knowledgeable ^^.
martinayotte Posted January 26, 2019 Posted January 26, 2019 18 minutes ago, jcorbet said: Okay. Can I help in any way? What do you mean ? If it about my post talking about u-boot in SPIFlash, forget about it for now ... It would take serious development, and I don't have an HC1 to try it out ...
jcorbet Posted January 26, 2019 Author Posted January 26, 2019 OK. Then I will complete my installation and set it up as a productive system. I am not so sure about how to backup this. But I am sure I will come up with a solution. Maybe I will just create an installation script and backup the content. When reading your bash scripts I feel like I really should learn it. Best to you both and the rest of the team
martinayotte Posted January 27, 2019 Posted January 27, 2019 6 hours ago, martinayotte said: If it about my post talking about u-boot in SPIFlash, forget about it for now ... It would take serious development, and I don't have an HC1 to try it out ... @Igor my brain is stuck on that thread ... You know that I "love" SPIFlash ... Do you have any HC1 board currently taking dust that you could ship it to me ? ...
Igor Posted January 27, 2019 Posted January 27, 2019 4 hours ago, martinayotte said: my brain is stuck on that thread ... You know that I "love" SPIFlash ... Do you have any HC1 board currently taking dust that you could ship it to me ? ... No & it looks like that flash is used for "SATA controller configuration".
martinayotte Posted January 27, 2019 Posted January 27, 2019 6 hours ago, Igor said: it looks like that flash is used for "SATA controller configuration". Right ! I didn't pay attention to which SPI it was connected ...
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