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Tried booting Venus OS 2.7_4 Large on Rpi 3B and 4 from USB/SSD without success. (Raspberry OS from both USB and SSD boots OK).
USB/SSD would make more sense now that SignalK and Node-Red are included in the Large version.
Cheers
Igor
P.S. Instructions imply USB stick should be bootable but still no go:
"For now not that easy yet: installing and updating is done using the offline install method: with usb stick or sd-card."
Hi, that quoted text is about installing an update onto a syatem that already has venus os installed.
Wrt running from ssd or usb: I have no idea how that can be done, if at all possible. A bit out of what I’ve experience with I’m afraid.
Whats wrong with using a large SD card?
Cheers, Mvader, for clarifying that line from the instructions.
Re SD card on VenusOS Large: read/write activity of some of the SignalK plugins can be quite intensive (e.g. buffering, logging) potentially leading to SD data corruption or worse. SSDs can handle this better and faster. I'm on a boat with power outages, internet cutting out, salt water everywhere etc, etc. :) So it's all about risk reduction and energy saving.
Best regards,
Igor
Hi Igor, thanks for coming back on this.
With regards to the logs, it can be made such that those logs are written to memory only, and not disk; which is probably better anyway and maybe already how we do it today (I dont know by heart).
With regards to booting from USB / SSD: I won't be looking at that anytime soon. But you (or anyone else) can. In which case I recommend to start reading and searching here: https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi/. We use open embedded as a build system for Venus OS; and that repo there is where most of OE knowledge wrt raspberrypis resides.
The other place is here: https://github.com/victronenergy/meta-victronenergy/. If you scroll (many) pages back in the commitlogs, or simply search for rpi and raspberrypi you'll find all the code that takes care of installing, auto-expanding as well as booting and so forth.
Starting with v2.70~4, we can now use the .swu mechanism, plugging in a USB flash drive with the new Venus version. This process only updates the active rootfs partition, retaining /data. Much easier than other options.
In the past, UPDATING Venus for RPI 4 required a reflash of the SD card which wipes the /data partition also. But with a Ubuntu (or other *nix) it's possible to copy the data partition from and old SD card to the new one. I use gparted after running the new card first to initialize and expand all the partitions. This mechanism still has value if you need to flash a new Venus SD card and retain a system's configuration.
Thanks, Kevin. I see now. I misread "installing" as installing from scratch from USB stick.
Best regards,
Igor
@mvader (Victron Energy) Any new information when booting of Venus OS from USB/SSD will work on Raspberry Pi 4? SSDs are more durable than SD cards so i prefer booting from SSD. Thank you
Main problem is the raspberryPy boot loader in the firmware (comparable to the BIOS / EFI on a PC) of the chip, that doesnt look in external usb devices for bootable media and expects the boot loader on the SD card in the card slot. You can then mount other file systems on external drives / symlink them and run the OS from there, no problem, but you still need a SD card to boot.
There were patches to the firmware to overcome this and boot from USB, the rpi3 was able to boot straight off the USB, rpi4 was a step backwards in this regard. There are tutorials on the internet how to use a SSD for the OS once you booted from the SD, it is not too difficult. You always can use a SSD or a USB drive to store write intensive data / logs and make the OS read only.
You can use a RAM disk as well, 8GB of RAM are plenty, even 4GB are more than the 1GB the cerbo has or the 512MB of the OCTO / Venus.
Another consideration is power consumption, the Pi cannot power external drives by USB, it barely has enough power to run properly, so you need a external power supply or powered USB HUB, this all drains power from your battery, the pi becomes an essential part of your battery when you use a networked BMS via CAN or serial port and DVCC, making your pi a critical component for the safety of your system - and one that needs to run 24x7, you want less power consumption then to not drain your battery when your system is longer unattended in storage.
*) UPDATE there is an update for the boot loader where you can now boot from USB or even LAN with a configuration menu on the pi to choose the boot order. You need a raspbean OS to update the boot loader, then you can boot of a SSD, when preparing the SSD for venus, edit fstab to point the links to the SSD partitions, then you should be good to boot your Venus OS from the SSD.
You may look in /etc/fstab and relocate the system to partitions on a ssd if you want to.
/dev/root / auto defaults 1 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
tmpfs /run tmpfs mode=0755,nodev,nosuid,strictatime 0 0
tmpfs /var/volatile tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /u-boot vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p4 /data ext4 noatime 0 2
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /u-boot vfat defaults 0 0
Due to the way VenusOS works and maintains two versions of the OS for redundancy and backup purposes there is no easy way to boot from SSD. VenusOS is designed as an embedded OS based around either emmc for the Victron based hardware solutions and SD-Card for PI.
While it might be possible to get it working, I suspect any update of VenusOS would then break and the backup image capability would not work.
For an embedded OS with predominantly read requirements from the SD-Card the MBTF of the card is likely high enough for many years of running.
What is the write needs that drive the need for SSD? If there is a major need for high writes that drives an SSD need then mount the SSD and link key folders onto the SSD.
Starting about v2.80 the /root partition is mounted read only so there are no writes to this part of the SD card. However, /data is mounted read/write and writes do occur for settings changes and for logs. There may be other things written to /data as well.
In addition, we remount /root to be read/write to install modifications. This is never undone so /root remains mounted as read/write, BUT since Venus is designed not to write to /root there should not be any writes to it in normal operation.
I have been working with Venus OS on a Raspberry PI for about 3 years and have yet to see an SD card corrupted by simply removing power. If there is any corruption, the file system checks performed at boot repair them. I have seen removing a USB flash drive corrupted if the drive isn't removed cleanly with the menu command in the VRM menu. The corruption is flagged when inserting the flash drive in a computer and disk repair may be needed to fix it. But again, the drive can be repaired.
I have a package that offers a clean shutdown menu option and also a GPIO shutdown pin:
https://github.com/kwindrem/ShutdownMonitor
https://github.com/kwindrem/RpiGpioSetup
Theses will help with manual shutdowns but won't address a power failure.
Note that Venus OS typically runs in an environment that is powered at all times from battery so a power failure is unlikely.
All that said, when I was running a Venus OS system on a Raspberry PI, I kept a spare SD card with an image of the working one with me just in case.
Hi
Then Venus OS booting from SDD is not yet possible, is it? Thank you
It is a pity that Venus OS can not boot to an SSD. I have gotten PiHole and Home Assistant to run from SSD without any issues. I played around with cmdline.txt to see if I could just correctly refer to the second partition, but nothing worked. I initially had hoped that I could plug the Victron USB directly into Home Assistant, and have the data available within HASIO. It appears this is not possible, so I grabbed my spare Pi3B+ and SSD and imaged the SSD, but could not make it boot. I cannot boot to SD on that Pi3B+ as the MicroSD card slot is broken. I have had this Pi 3B+ booting to SSD many times with multiple images, but SD card is not an option. I would rather not have to buy a new Raspberry Pi for this, particularly with the ridiculous prices over the last two years.
Having Home Assistant read the data directly from the USB cable would be my preferred option, so I may just research that option a little further.
The issues to just get the RPI4 booting was a night mare. It is all about software compatibility of various components, firmware, u-boot, etc. It is a niche group of people that want SSD booting. If you want to make its work then the area to look at is u-boot and how it interacts with the inbuilt RPI firmware. Oh and a serial console is going to be needed to debug and get this working.
Booting from SSD will be more and more important, because we all know SD card used for the current Vinus OS booting process has limited life after too many read/write. The last thing you would want to see happening is when you SD card crash & die and your PV/Storage system stop operating and blackout while you are not on-prem. Booting from SSD gives the reliability the victron community needed for the system reliability.
