Ebrius Disputatios

There Were Some Anomalies In The last Series.

Everything wasn't as perfect as my last post may have indicated, for no sooner had I ended my last post on this subject, some strange things started happening. Well two things actually, but they occurred more than once. Also, it should be noted that I've disabled arm_boost and throttled the CPU speed down to 1GHz for this particular test, since I don't think that I have to max the CPU out since running at 1GHz still runs everything smoothly and keeps the processor cooler too.

The first thing I began to notice were unscheduled shutdowns and restarts. Which when investigated using the command 'last reboot,' I found out that those reboots were caused by crashes on two separate occasions, presumably by the kernel. The second thing I noticed were higher temperatures, even though I have active cooling via fans and heat sinks.

On further investigation, I also found out that the current default, stable Raspberry Pi OS kernel, 6.12.62+rpt-rpi, had seven unscheduled reboots, in nine days, due to crashes as well and, the previous Raspberry Pi OS kernel, 6.12.47+rpt-rpi, crashed twice in all the weeks or months since it was installed, presumably.

Now this is becoming more intriguing, since perhaps, this is more than just kernels failing, perhaps, it has to do with the Raspberry Pi OS or any other number of things, including drivers, hardware and more. Now I only refer to the operating system since I have four other Pis that are running other operating systems, that aren't exhibiting these symptomatic anomalies. Two of them are running Debian Trixie, another is running Alpine Linux and another is running OpenWRT.

Anyway, I couldn't stay away from tinkering again so a few days ago, I upgraded from kernel 6.19.0 to 6.19.3 and so far, although it may obviously, be too early to tell, everything seems to be working well again, with kernel 6.19.3. I don't have too much relevant data to make any conclusions but I have learned more about benchmarks and testing suites to help give these kernels and the system in general, some stress tests and see how things pan out.

I just updated the git tree and I noticed that kernel 6.18.13 is ready for testing although it may be 6.18.12 in the Raspberry Pi OS tree. Either way, we'll see how they're progressing too and hopefully, while I'm still evaluating kernel 6.19.3 I won't have any serious issues.