BASH bug and HomeTroller Zee

[rjh]

I have run HS3 PRO on the latest hard float Zee with MONO 3.X, and yes it does work. The problem is that each plugin is its own EXE and runs under its own MONO process which means each one uses at least 50MB of RAM, so you can easily run out of memory. If you only need a couple of plugins, then you are probably ok. Ideally, the Zee could use 1GB of RAM, maybe in a future hardware revision.

Thank you Rich.

Yup see that on the top of the Linux tools page. I apologize as I didn't see that before and assumed that I was going to see it running top.



So can I try to run Homeseer 3 Pro on my Zee just to see if I can run HS3 Pro on my Zee?

Well I was going to give it a try anyways cuz the very first time I tried it didn't work and I read on the forum it was because it was related to the version of Mono running on my soft floated Zee.

I have been running remote plugins to the HS3 Zee box talking to the "other" Linux boxes (32bit and 64bit) concurrent with the HS3 lite running on the Zee and it's worked just fine.

[Pete]

Thank you Rich.

Yup see that on the top of the Linux tools page. I apologize as I didn't see that before and assumed that I was going to see it running top.

Linux version: Linux ICS-HomeTrollerZEE 3.12.28+ #709 PREEMPT Mon Sep 8 15:28:00 BS 2014 armv6l GNU/Linux Hard Float

So can I try to run Homeseer 3 Pro on my Zee just to see if I can run HS3 Pro on my Zee?

Well I was going to give it a try anyways cuz the very first time I tried it didn't work and I read on the forum it was because it was related to the version of Mono running on my soft floated Zee.

I have been running remote plugins to the HS3 Zee box talking to the "other" Linux boxes (32bit and 64bit) concurrent with the HS3 lite running on the Zee and it's worked just fine.

[rjh]

Hard float is a little faster. We originally used the soft float version because MONO did not support the hardware floating point processor in the hardware. It does now, so all Zee's have been shipping with the hard float version of Linux for quite a few months. If you to the Linux Tools page, it will tell you which version you have at the top of the page.

Mee too.

Not sure what I have relating to hard and soft float.

Thinking the original Zee was hard float eh?

I did upgrade the firmware using the currently posted image a couple of months back. I also upgraded the original 4Gb SD to a 16Gb SD card.

How can I tell?

The following stuff confused me a bit relating to my purchased Zee.



Guessing my ZeeLite Rasberry Pi is a hard float and today will let me install and run the regular Linux HS3 Pro version on the first generation of ZeeLite hardware eh?

Found it googling a bit...



Looking at the Zee tools / Linux Tools tab top see the following. (what do I look for relating to the soft and hard thing?)



Checking mine it appears to be a hard float (guessing that is good?) with the assumption that the hard float is better than the soft float?



Mono stuff shows hard also and I am at version 3.2.8 now on my ZeeLite.



Does this mean that I could try running my HS3 Pro for Linux on the ZeeLite? (just to see if it works?)

[Pete]

Mee too.

Not sure what I have relating to hard and soft float.

Thinking the original Zee was hard float eh?

I did upgrade the firmware using the currently posted image a couple of months back. I also upgraded the original 4Gb SD to a 16Gb SD card.

How can I tell?

The following stuff confused me a bit relating to my purchased Zee.

What is Raspbian?

Raspbian is an unofficial port of Debian wheezy armhf with compilation settings adjusted to produce code that uses "hardware floating point", the "hard float" ABI and will run on the Raspberry Pi.

The port is necessary because the official Debian wheezy armhf release is compatible only with versions of the ARM architecture later than the one used on the Raspberry Pi (ARMv7-A CPUs and higher, vs the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 CPU).

The Debian squeeze image issued by the Raspberry Pi foundation was based on debian armel which uses software floating point and the "soft float" ABI. The foundation used the existing Debian port for less capable ARM devices. Therefore, it did not use of the Pi's processor's floating point hardware - reducing the Pi's performance during floating point intensive applications - or the advanced instructions of the ARMv6 CPU.

What do you mean by "soft float ABI" and "hard float ABI?"

ABI stands for application binary interface. The term has slightly different meanings in different contexts but in this context it refers to the set of rules used to set up registers and the stack when calling and returning from functions and other details that are required for binaries to be compatible with each other.

The "soft float" ABI passes floating point parameters in integer registers while the "hard float ABI" passes them in vfp (floating point) registers. The two ABIs are not compatible because they use different registers. It is possible to use hardware floating point with the soft-float ABI but doing so means that whenever a floating point value is passed to or returned from a function it must be transferred to an integer register incurring a performance penalty.

Guessing my ZeeLite Rasberry Pi is a hard float and today will let me install and run the regular Linux HS3 Pro version on the first generation of ZeeLite hardware eh?

Found it googling a bit...

Let's assume that I am dropped into a room with a Raspberry Pi running either Debian or Raspbian. How do I find out if it has hard float support or if it is just using soft float?

1 - Check for the existence of the directory:

/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf

the soft-float version do not have this directory, they have:

2 - /lib/arm-linux-gnueabi

instead, or you can list the packages installed using:

3 - dpkg -l

and see the platform in the third column (all/armhf/armel)

Looking at the Zee tools / Linux Tools tab top see the following. (what do I look for relating to the soft and hard thing?)

Some useful commands:
df -H (Display disk usage)
top -b -n 1 (Display memory and process usage)
ls -l (Display file directory)

running comand top -b -n 1 (noticed that command is spelled wrong)

top - 08:03:35 up 1 day, 19:28, 0 users, load average: 0.20, 0.12, 0.25
Tasks: 70 total, 1 running, 68 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 5.3 us, 1.6 sy, 0.7 ni, 92.1 id, 0.2 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 447864 total, 327040 used, 120824 free, 55948 buffers
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 155584 cached

Checking mine it appears to be a hard float (guessing that is good?) with the assumption that the hard float is better than the soft float?

root@ZEELite:/lib# ls
arm-linux-gnueabihf
libip4tc.so.0
libnih.so.1.0.0
cpp
libip4tc.so.0.1.0
libxtables.so.7
firmware
libip6tc.so.0
libxtables.so.7.0.0
init
libip6tc.so.0.1.0
lsb . . .

Mono stuff shows hard also and I am at version 3.2.8 now on my ZeeLite.

root@ZEELite:/lib# mono -V
Mono JIT compiler version 3.2.8 (Debian 3.2.8+dfsg-4+rpi1)
Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Novell, Inc, Xamarin Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
TLS: __thread
SIGSEGV: normal
Notifications: epoll
Architecture: armel,vfp+hard
Disabled: none
Misc: softdebug
LLVM: supported, not enabled.
GC: sgen

Does this mean that I could try running my HS3 Pro for Linux on the ZeeLite? (just to see if it works?)

[rmasonjr]

Mine updated with no errors. I bought mine when it was first released almost a year ago.

I did notice that the load average of the Zee has increased since the update. I was running at roughly 40-50% - now running at near 90% now. I have 111 devices, 32 Z-Wave nodes, 47 events.

[rjh]

I will look into this, the update worked ok when I tested it. Can you tell me if you had a soft float or hard float version of the OS? That info would have been displayed on the Linux Tools page at the top. If you don't know, how long ago did you purchase the Zee?

Would these errors be normal at the end...?

Setting up raspberrypi-bootloader (1.20140908-1) ...
Memory split is now set in /boot/config.txt.
You may want to use raspi-config to set it
rm: cannot remove `/boot/bootcode.bin': Read-only file system
dpkg: error processing raspberrypi-bootloader (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi0:
libraspberrypi0 depends on raspberrypi-bootloader (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package raspberrypi-bootloader is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi0 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-bin:
libraspberrypi-bin depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-bin (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-dev:
libraspberrypi-dev depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-dev (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-doc:
libraspberrypi-doc depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-doc (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Setting up raspi-config (20140902-1) ...
Setting up rpi-update (20140705) ...
Setting up ssh (1:6.0p1-4+deb7u2) ...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
raspberrypi-bootloader
libraspberrypi0
libraspberrypi-dev
libraspberrypi-doc
libraspberrypi-bin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
homeseer@HomeTrollerZEE ~ $


Edit/Update:
Apparently, that was a BAD thing. Homeseer wouldn't restart. Looking at the local video, it couldn't find the right files after rebooting.

I remotely logged in, ran the manual version update (to 106), and... it's still dead

The final boot up (from HDMI port) line reads:
[FAIL] startpar: service(s) returned failure: rc.local ... failed!


I'll play more in a few days when I have time to re-image the flash card.

[Pete]

Yup; looks like the update never finished.

The first time I updated the Zee (months ago) it took well over an hour to get all of the updates. I just walked away from it.

I would just take the SD card out, copy over your HS3 directory, reimage, copy your HS3 directory back; then update again.

I mentioned sometime or another that I use Webmin on the Zee.

It does work well with this sort of stuff.

[NutsyHome]

Would these errors be normal at the end...?

Setting up raspberrypi-bootloader (1.20140908-1) ...
Memory split is now set in /boot/config.txt.
You may want to use raspi-config to set it
rm: cannot remove `/boot/bootcode.bin': Read-only file system
dpkg: error processing raspberrypi-bootloader (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi0:
libraspberrypi0 depends on raspberrypi-bootloader (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package raspberrypi-bootloader is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi0 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-bin:
libraspberrypi-bin depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-bin (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-dev:
libraspberrypi-dev depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-dev (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libraspberrypi-doc:
libraspberrypi-doc depends on libraspberrypi0 (= 1.20140908-1); however:
Package libraspberrypi0 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing libraspberrypi-doc (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Setting up raspi-config (20140902-1) ...
Setting up rpi-update (20140705) ...
Setting up ssh (1:6.0p1-4+deb7u2) ...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
raspberrypi-bootloader
libraspberrypi0
libraspberrypi-dev
libraspberrypi-doc
libraspberrypi-bin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
homeseer@HomeTrollerZEE ~ $


Edit/Update:
Apparently, that was a BAD thing. Homeseer wouldn't restart. Looking at the local video, it couldn't find the right files after rebooting.

I remotely logged in, ran the manual version update (to 106), and... it's still dead

The final boot up (from HDMI port) line reads:
[FAIL] startpar: service(s) returned failure: rc.local ... failed!


I'll play more in a few days when I have time to re-image the flash card.

[rjh]

[UPDATE 10-1-14]

To just update bash use the following commands, you can do this from the Linux system tools screen, or from SSH:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade bash

Full update instructions:

A new vulnerability in Liunx has been found related to the bash command interpreter. If your Zee is behind a firewall, we do not see any way you could be affected by this. The Apache web server is affected, but the Zee is not running Apache, the HomeSeer web server is our own.

Any Zee purchased from us after 9/29/14 will already be up to date.

A patch has been released so if you want to upgrade your Zee, here are some instructions:

* First back up your HomeSeer configuration from Setup. This is just in case something bad happens and you need to restore later.

I will list 2 procedures

Procedure 1:

If you want to monitor the upgrade process, SSH to your Zee and log in. Then run the following commands:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This updates the OS and will install the patched version of bash. Restart the unit when completed.

Procedure 2:

If you don't want to use SSH (or don't know how), do this:

1) Bring up the web interface on your Zee and select "Linux Tools" from the Tools->System menu. Enter your system password.

2) In the "Execute a Linux Command" box, enter:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot

In the same box, now enter:

apt-get -q -y update

Wait for this to output its results on the screen, it may take a few minutes.

2) Refresh the page to clear the last results.

3) In the same box enter:

apt-get -q -y upgrade

This may take up to 20 minutes or longer to complete, the screen will remain blank until it finishes. When its done you will see the results.

4) Restart the unit.