fvdw on raspi4

[fvdw]

Matzi

what filesytem did you put on these external disks ?

In the meantime I found why my exfat disk didn't show up when mounted as external disk. This is because fuse device is missing , we need to load fuse module
For same reason when mounted as internal disk the exfat disk is not mounted on /share/2000 because mount fails. As result the disk cannot be used.
I will look for fuse module and post it soon

I guess your problems may be related to the file system you have put on those disks

[matzi]

Hi Fvdw,

yes the file system is a point. I do not know exactly what file system I had yesterday (guess it was ..fat..). Now that it is externally ntfs formatted, it works fine as external disks (both hdd and ssd).

So I think there are two problems: The initializing of disks in fvdw software on raspi has problems as Jocko mentioned.
And the use as internal disks does not work, related to fuse module as you said.

About the bootup kernel messages:
I took a photo during boot because I could not find that in dmesg.
At one place it says: /etc/init.d/rcS: line 47: can't create /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug: nonexistent directory

[Jocko]

Hi matzi,

At one place it says: /etc/init.d/rcS: line 47: can't create /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug: nonexistent directory

You can forget this point. rcS try to remove a default settings (for old environment) which may impact udev. With this kernel version, it seems it is no longer here and then there is no real issue with this error.

We go to add a check on this file before writing on it to remove the warning

[fvdw]

I reviewed the file system and as well cuse as fuse modules are present in the firmware and loaded at boot. Also fuse device is present.
Why it did not work on my system was because I took the sd card from raspberry 2 and put that in the pi 4. In that case the insert-modules routine is not found as it has the name for rspb2. After changing that everything works as expected. The exfat disk is visible and mounted ok when used as external disk and also when used as internal disk. In that case it is also visible in disk setup window as volume. So everything seems ok.

Can you post the output of this command just to be sure that in your case the modules are loaded

Code: Select all

lsmod

Output should be like this

Code: Select all

$ lsmod
udf 90112 0 - Live 0xbf144000
isofs 45056 0 - Live 0xbf133000
cuse 16384 0 - Live 0xbf12b000
fuse 98304 3 cuse, Live 0xbf109000
cifs 581632 0 - Live 0xbf05f000
nfsd 303104 1 - Live 0xbf000000

[matzi]

lsmosd give a similar resultto yours:

Using username "root".
root@fvdwsl-base-pi:/ # lsmod
udf 90112 0 - Live 0xbf144000
isofs 45056 0 - Live 0xbf133000
cuse 16384 0 - Live 0xbf12b000
fuse 98304 5 cuse, Live 0xbf109000
cifs 581632 0 - Live 0xbf05f000
nfsd 303104 11 - Live 0xbf000000

summarized I think my problems originally arose from the attempt to initialise the disks from fvdw internally. Everything works fines since I connected the externally formatted disks.

Meanwhile I did some speed tests:

[list=]
write to volume 1 usb white 2MB/s
write to volume 2 usb white 2MB/s
read from vol1 usb white 5MB/s
read from vol2 usb white 5MB/s
read from vol1 usb blue 4MB/s
read from vol1 usb blue 4MB/s
write to volume 1 usb blue 2MB/s
write to volume 2 usb blue 2MB/s
write to 5big2 3,7MB/s
read from5big2 5MB/s
[/list]

For the test I used many small files (fotos). Is that what we cannormally expect? I wonder there is so small differneces regardless if using usb2or3 or hdd or sdd.

May I have a wish? What about driver for the internal wifi?

[fvdw]

What kind of file system did you use to format the disks?
Ext4 will give highest performance. Using ntfs will give slowest.
I will do a test tomorrow to see what is possible but it should be more then what you got I expect. Also using samba 4 will improve read and writing speed compared to samba v1. Did you use samba 4?
Last remark many small files always give low writing speed, this because of the many file headers to be written

I will look which modules are required for the on board wifi but can take a some days as I have some other jobs to do also.

[matzi]

I have ntfs on the disks.

I did some more tests now trying ntfs and ext4. Further I checked the influence of using samba 3 or 4. What really matters is the samba version. That increases witing to 8-10MB/s and reading to about 7.5 MB/s. The filesystem seems not to matter a lot.

Furthermore my HDD makes strange noise with ext4. Are there disks not recommended for ext4? It is a WDC WD10SMZW-11Y0TS0

[Jocko]

Hi matzi,

Indeed with ext4 fs it may have some "quiet initialization" actions after formatting a disk.

By default and many tools use them, some lazy options allow to initialize quickly an ext4 fs and carry over some actions to finish initialization. These options are lazy_itable_init and lazy_journal_init.
For example with a 1TB disk, to set fully the itable and the journal, almost 24 hours is required !

So maybe it is this "noisy" step you noticed and also may have impacts on R/W speed as long as these actions are still running.

Other point, it is not clear for me if you made or not other attempts to initialize the USB disks from the fvdw-sl interface. And if you succeeded

[fvdw]

I did a test today with exfat, i will do ext4 this evening.
I took a file of 800 MB using usb-3.0( blue connector) on samba 1 it reached writing speed of 20 MB/s on samba 4 60 MB/s.
I did not try many small files.

Ps on samba 4 I noticed an issue to delete files on the exfat volume. Windows complained command not available. On samba 1 no issues. I need to check whats going on there.

Ps are you sure that your ethernet connection is set to 1Gbit?
Typically writing speed is lower than reading. In your case it is opposite and limit to 8-10 MB/s that is typically for a 100 Mbits connection

[matzi]

You are right, my speed was set to "green mode" limited to 100Mb/s. Now that I changed that, my read/ write speed is 20/10MB/s. I also used a large file now.

Shame on me! I was not exact about formatting the disks! The function which failed was "initialising" disk from the disk setup-setup menu. I saw that the disk setup- external disks menu has a format function when a disk is identified as external. I would consider usb connected disks as external but they do not show up here. So I am wrong somehow!?