What Happened in .51?

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Issues with 51

Ok, since I’ve flashed 51 onto my 770, all hell has broken loose. So far I’ve had these issues:

  • News Reader won’t load (and it constantly refreshes)
  • Sporadic reboots
  • Out of Memory errors (I never had them before)
  • Using swapon causes immediate out of memory and or reboot

I had to finally re-flash ’51 again, and this time I didn’t restore by data (which I had backed-up using the built in control utility) back onto the 770. It seems more stable now, except for the issues using swap. I don’t mind resetting up my stuff by hand- my backup data must have corrupted something.

People I’ve talked with talk about initial reboots, but then ‘things calm down over time’ which seems impossible to me- how can things calm down? They should stay the same at least.

Does anyone have any solid information on what has changed in this release?

Gainroot and Root

Meanwhile, I’ve been banging my head with gainroot, and why it wouldn’t read the .profile of the root user in /root… nothing was working, till I finally realized that perhaps this wasn’t some new shell I was in.. and sure enough, invoking su – while in ‘gainroot’ put me into a proper root shell with a working environment. See below for the difference in environments…

~ $ sudo gainroot
Root shell enabled

BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/home/user # env
SUDO_GID=29999
USER=root
HOME=/home/user
SUDO_UID=29999
LOGNAME=root
MALLOC_MMAP_THRESHOLD_=32768
TERM=xterm-color
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
SUDO_COMMAND=/usr/sbin/gainroot
SHELL=/bin/sh
SUDO_USER=user
MALLOC_TRIM_THRESHOLD_=4096
PWD=/home/user

Now with a proper root shell:

/home/user # su -

BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

Nokia770-51:~# env
USER=root
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/var/lib/install/usr/lib:/var/lib/install/usr/lib
HOME=/root
PS1=\h:\w\$ 
LOGNAME=root
MALLOC_MMAP_THRESHOLD_=32768
TERM=xterm-color
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:
/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/var/lib/install/usr/bin:
/var/lib/install/usr/sbin
SHELL=/bin/sh
MALLOC_TRIM_THRESHOLD_=4096
PWD=/root

Nokia770-51:~# 

That’s one small consolation.

3 thoughts on “What Happened in .51?

  1. Here’s the swap usage info on my 770 from meminfo. This is after 1 day of usage and with opera, rss, realplayer, fbreader and gaim open.

    SwapTotal: 18680 kB
    SwapFree: 7460 kB

    i think you may want to reduce the size of your swap. 128MB may be a little too much :)

  2. That just doesn’t make any sense to me… I had the resets but they never stopped. Since I’ve re-flashed 51 again and didn’t restore data I haven’t had one reboot.

    However, as SOON as I enable swap (128megs of it on a dedicated partition) I get an out of memory error. I’m thinking that perhaps I have too much swap.

    Tommy- can you see any swap actually being used? Try looking in /proc/meminfo.

  3. I did the same upgrade/restore to wk51 image as well, but i haven’t experience any major issues. I’ve gotten 2 – 3 sporadic reset since the upgrade; all during the initial hour after upgrade when i was installing the deb packages back. One thing i did change since upgrading(even before running the build in restore) was that i move the simlink to my mmcswap.sh script form S27mmcswap.sh to S02mmcswap.sh so that the swap space is setup up as early as possible. Don’t know if that affects anything, but i am happy with wk51 so far.

    The gainroot thing has been bugging me also, thanks for the heads-up.

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