Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Fixing Raspberry Pi Crashes

The most common crash I've experienced/heard about posts an error that says:
raspberrypi kernel: <1-1.1:1.0: eth0: kevent 2 may have been dropped

This happens to a lot of people who are torrenting (probably using transmission) and especially to external HDDs. It tends to turn up in /var/log/messages and/or /var/log/kernel and/or /var/log/dmesg. You can cat these to see if the error is there.

There are a couple of reasons that this happens and the following has been the way I have managed to fix it (Supposedly there is a bug fix in a distant future kernel release).

Reason 1:

Memory isn't available fast enough and for some reason the kernel crashes.
I did two things to fix this.
1: Increase the number of min_kbytes by editing sysctl.conf
 (using vim or nano or whatever)
Start by opening a terminal then type the following to edit the proper files.

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

at the end of the file add the following line
vm.min_free_kbytes = 16384

*Note, if that doesn't help, try increasing the number
Example:
vm.min_free_kbytes = 32768

Then save and exit the file.

The second thing I did was to add an option to the boot command

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

At the end of the line, add: smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N

Save, exit the file, and then reboot (sudo reboot)

Reason 2:

Your usb hub has a problem where it is creating a feedback loop.

Tape over the +5V pin on the USB cord (You should use a multimeter to find it). Fixed, though a bit sketchily.



Check out my other Raspberry Pi Fixes/How tos:
http://stevenhickson.blogspot.com/2012/10/using-raspberry-pi-as-web-server-media.html
http://stevenhickson.blogspot.com/2012/08/setting-up-omxplayer-gui-on-raspberry-pi.html

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