Thank you all for your responses!

The second device that failed yesterday booted normally today when I 
wanted to investigate it. Not sure if it really had the same problem. Is 
it likely that such r/w problems come and go again?

Both of these devices were equipped with with Kingston SDC4/8GB cards. 
So, not a no-name product, but very cheap and for sure not industrial grade.

Based on your inputs I think I will stick to the btrfs-raid1 setup for 
now. But I will try to upgrade to a newer kernel version and also use 
better SDcards. However I don't think we can afford to use real 
industrial grade SDcards in our device...

Am 25.02.2016 um 20:18 schrieb Hegner Robert:

Thanks Lionel for your explanations!

I just noticed that a second device with the same setup (which has been
working only some hours ago) failed as well. So two systems which were
running with a non-raid1 and non-btrfs setup for weeks or months before,
and which were updated to the btrfs-raid1 system only recently, both
failed within only a couple of hours...

Tomorrow I will check if both of these devices are equipped with the
same SDcard brand/model.

We spent quite some time to find find a solution which makes our
embedded system more resistant against power failures and all the
flash-memory related problems. The idea with the btrfs-raid1 came from
(http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/186954) and it made perfect sense to me
to use a filesystem which is designed with flash-memory in mind and to
use raid1 to achieve some redundancy. But it looks like this was wrong
thinking...

So, in your experience
1) Which are the SDcards we can trust in? (brand? model?)
2) What would be a better way (with or without the use of btrfs) to make
an embedded system more robust against power failures and
flash-memory-wearing?

I know these questions are a little bit off-topic here. But since you
seem to have some experience with this (and because I'm quite desperate
now that I found out that my allegedly good solution is actually worse
than what we had before) I would really appreciate your inputs.

Robert

Am 25.02.2016 um 19:08 schrieb Lionel Bouton:

quoted

Hi,

Le 25/02/2016 18:44, Hegner Robert a écrit :

quoted

Am 25.02.2016 um 18:34 schrieb Hegner Robert:

quoted

Hi all!

I'm working on a embedded system (ARM) running from a SDcard.

 From experience, most SD cards are not to be trusted. They are not
designed for storing an operating system and application data but for
storing pictures and videos written on a VFAT...

quoted

quoted

Recently I
switched to a btrfs-raid1 configuration, hoping to make my system more
resistant against power failures and flash-memory specific problems.

Note that there's no gain against power failures with RAID1.

quoted

quoted

However today one of my devices wouldn't mount my root filesystem as rw
anymore.

The main reason I'm asking in this mailing list is not that I want to
restory data. But I'd like to understand what happened and, even more
importantly, find out what I have to do so that something like this
will
never happen again.

Here is some info about my system:

root@ObserverOne:~# uname -a
Linux ObserverOne 3.16.0-4-armmp #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u6
(2015-11-09) armv7l GNU/Linux

This is a very old kernel considering BTRFS code is moving fast. But in
this instance this is not your problem.

quoted

quoted

root@ObserverOne:~# btrfs --version
Btrfs v3.17

root@ObserverOne:~# btrfs fi show
Label: none  uuid: eef07fbf-77cb-427a-b118-bf5295f25b66
          Total devices 2 FS bytes used 816.80MiB
          devid    1 size 3.45GiB used 3.02GiB path /dev/mmcblk0p2
          devid    2 size 3.45GiB used 3.02GiB path /dev/mmcblk0p3

You use RAID1 on the same device: it could protect you against localized
errors but "localized" is difficult to define on a device which could
remap it's address space in various locations : nothing will prevent a
flash failure to affect both of your partitions. In this case RAID1 is
useless.
In fact using RAID1 on two partitions of the same physical device will
probably end up causing corruption earlier than without it: you are
writing twice as much to the same device, generating bad blocks twice as
fast.

quoted

[...]

quoted

[   12.021717] sunxi-mmc 1c0f000.mmc: smc 0 err, cmd 25, WR EBE !!
[   12.027695] sunxi-mmc 1c0f000.mmc: data error, sending stop command
[   12.035780] mmcblk0: timed out sending r/w cmd command, card status
0x900
[   12.042640] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386304
[   12.048680] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386312
[   12.054708] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386320
[   12.060725] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386328
[   12.066744] BTRFS: bdev /dev/mmcblk0p3 errs: wr 1, rd 0, flush 0,
corrupt 0, gen 0

Error on first partition.

quoted

[   12.074324] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386336
[   12.080339] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386344
[   12.086353] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386352
[   12.092378] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 12386360
[   12.098393] BTRFS: bdev /dev/mmcblk0p3 errs: wr 2, rd 0, flush 0,
corrupt 0, gen 0
[   12.688370] sunxi-mmc 1c0f000.mmc: smc 0 err, cmd 25, WR EBE !!
[   12.694342] sunxi-mmc 1c0f000.mmc: data error, sending stop command
[   12.702553] mmcblk0: timed out sending r/w cmd command, card status
0x900
[   12.709448] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 2019328
[   12.715393] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 2019336
[   12.721333] BTRFS: bdev /dev/mmcblk0p2 errs: wr 1, rd 0, flush 0,
corrupt 0, gen 0

Error on second partition.
So both are unreliable : RAID1 can't help, game over.

Lionel
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