ARM appliances and boot loops
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Hi
I was just wondering: I myself have had two boxes (SG-1100 and SG-3100) doing boot loops because of a faulty filesystem after an upgrade and also after a power outage.
Judging from the “many” posts in here it seems a lot of people are experiencing boot loops on the ARM appliances - even on new factory shipped boxes.
Is there an issue that makes the ARM architecture version of pfSense way more susceptible to file system corruption than the x86-64 version? Is there something we can do to make our installs more resillient?
I hope some work will be put into making the ARM appliances way way more tolerant to file system corruptions - especially from power outages.Love the no fuss of using the official appliances :-)
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@luckman212 In my SG-3100 install, 21.05.2, there wasn't an option to select ZFS..
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Ah, didn't realize none of the ARM units do ZFS (yet). Sorry about that. I believe it's "in the works"
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@keyser Apparently ZFS will be the default on pfSense+ 22.01, including ARM appliances. Look at timestamp 7:28 on this YouTube video.
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@bigsy Nope. That's a 6100 (Intel Atom)
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@luckman212 The video clearly shows an 1100. Watch it for a few seconds from 7:28 onwards.
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@bigsy But ZFS on such small devices seems overkill - not to mention you cannot do anything But Raid Z0 since there is only One storage device.
Also - ZFS does have a rather aggressive write method, so I would worry rather alot about the endurance of the eMMC -
@bigsy I stand corrected! Thanks for pointing that out.
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@keyser said in ARM appliances and boot loops:
endurance of the eMMC
I couldn't find it in a quick search but I recall at least one or two threads about this topic in the past few months.
One can cut down logging quite a bit...turn off logging of packets blocked by the default block rules, disable compression of log files, IDS logging of HTTP traffic, etc.
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Yeah, the option to install ZFS is now present in 22.01 as the default. You can still install UFS if you want though and upgrades will obviously still be UFS.
Before 22.01 if you are regularly seeing power outages one option is to enable RAM discs. I've yet to see a system suffer filesystem damage when RAM discs are enabled but they are not compatible with some of the larger packages. Notably Snort, Suricata and Squid.
Steve
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@stephenw10 said in ARM appliances and boot loops:
Yeah, the option to install ZFS is now present in 22.01 as the default. You can still install UFS if you want though and upgrades will obviously still be UFS.
Before 22.01 if you are regularly seeing power outages one option is to enable RAM discs. I've yet to see a system suffer filesystem damage when RAM discs are enabled but they are not compatible with some of the larger packages. Notably Snort, Suricata and Squid.
Steve
I'll keep using UFS, I have a no-break here..
ZFS increases the amount of disk writes, no point for me to switch as I don't need to care about data loss in an eventual power outage. -
@keyser According to a post from a Netgate employee in this Reddit thread, "Unfortunately the 3100 won't be seeing ZFS (or the SG-1000) due to architectural issues with ZFS support (they both run armv7 and has issues with ZFS on that platform)."
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Yes, that's true, ZFS will not be an option on the 32 bit ARM platforms.
Steve
