[Discuss] Raspberry Pi 4+ running Ubuntu Mate on SSD connected via USB error

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2021-04-07 02:55-0600 Murray Strome wrote:

> I find that after it has been running for quite a while (maybe even days), the system "freezes". With a wireless keyboard/mouse the mouse can move the cursor, but nothing happens when I try to click on anything and the it does not respond to anything I try with the keyboard. Also, my SSH connection from other computers is terminated and when I try to reconnect, it cannot do so until I turn off the bower to the RP and turn it on again, forcing a reboot. These errors may not have anything to do with the above problem, but when I look at syslog, I find a lot of these errors:Error performing housekeeping for drive /org/freedesktop/UDisks2/drives/Samsung_SSD_860_EVO_250GB_S59WNZFN900
> 678B: Error updating SMART data: Error sending ATA command CHECK POWER MODE:
> ATA command failed: error=0x00 count=0xff status=0x69 (g-io-error-quark, 0)

Hi Murray:

It has been many years since we have met face to face, and we should remedy that once (if ever)
this COVID crisis is finished.

What tweaked my curiosity about what you said above, is you appear to
be getting issues related to power control, and those might be related
to the instability (kernel freezes) I discussed some time ago for my
Ryzen 7 1700 system.  That system proved to be unstable until I set a
specific power control in the BIOS (which was not possible until I
upgraded the BIOS which may have introduced additional BIOS fixes to
bring that hardware into line with its published power control specs),
and got a new Linux kernel that was compatible (finally after more
than a year screwing around) with that upgraded BIOS.  Then fast
forward a few years (this is the part of the story I haven't mentioned
here before), and the whole instability problem appeared again (!) for
a whole series of kernel versions than mysteriously disappeared, thank
God, (this time with no BIOS changes) for the latest Debian linux
kernel!  So I have concluded from this experience that power control
is rather an iffy part of the Linux kernel these days, and you may
similarly be a victim of that type of issue.  So make sure you have
all your BIOS upgrades, keep following the latest kernel, and hope the
problem disappears would be a prescription that might work.  Another
possibility, of course, is connector trouble so I would swap those
around to see if that reduces/eliminates the instability you seem to
be experiencing.

Good luck, and let us know if/when you are able to resolve this.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Research affiliation with the Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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