Re: Raspberry Pi, swapping cards.

[David Restall <dave%restall.net@localhost>]

Hi Greg,

Many thanks for your response.

>   swap the power supplies as well.  It is possible that one is weak, and
>   that NetBSD stresses it more than the other thing you are running.  I
>   don't think this is super likely, but it's easy.

This hit the nail on the head.  Two Raspberry Pi's and three power
supplies.  Devuan Linux boots and runs fine on both cards and all three
power supplies.  NetBSD boots fine on one card in all three supplies, it
only boots on one PSU using the other card.  It looks as if I have some
tired power supplies mating up with a slightly low tolerance Raspberry Pi.
Now I'm aware of the problem, I can live with it.  I'd seen reports of
making sure you had good spec PSU's but didn't make the connection in
this case (they are all pretty much 'official' PSU's - supplied by RS
components in the UK).

The Pi does seem to feel hotter to the touch with NetBSD on it than it
does with Devuan so maybe it is drawing a bit more current from the PSU.
I'll be doing some side by side tests in the next few days to learn a
bit more.

Regards,




D
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> Your question is entirely reasonable.
> 
> > Today I took the SD Card and plugged it into another Raspberry Pi.
> > It boots and I get a login prompt but there is no network connectivity
> > (I couldn't ping it or ssh to it) and the USB keyboard doesn't work.
> > It looks as if the USB bus doesn't get started - the keyboard caps lock
> > doesn't cause any lights to come on for instance.  These are both early
> > Raspberry Pi models :-
> >
> > Hardware        : BCM2835
> > Revision        : 0000
> >
> > If I swap the card back to the original hardware it works fine.  Is this
> > a known quirk or have I missed something in the build process.
> >
> > I know the Pi's are both good - I can do the card shuffle with a Devuan
> > image and it all works fine.
> 
> I am not aware of this being a known issue.
> 
> Two thoughts:
> 
>   swap the power supplies as well.  It is possible that one is weak, and
>   that NetBSD stresses it more than the other thing you are running.  I
>   don't think this is super likely, but it's easy.
> 
>   Extract the dmesg output from the system that doesn't start USB, and
>   compare it to the one that does.   You will likely have to remove the
>   timestamps to do this.    This output should end up in
>   /var/log/messages.
>