Power off Raspberry PI 3 CloudHub

Submitted by ploebb on #1

Hey there,

I just wondered if it is safe to just pull the power on the Raspberry Pi with CloudHub flashed, since the PI in general is known to destroy SD-cards this way.

It seems that you use a tmpfs (RAM-disk) so I assume that this is specifically designed to be able to just cut the power to the PI without problems?
I also noticed that the usual "shutdown -h" (over ssh) returns "shutdown: not found" and there is no option to issue a shutdown from the client.

Am I correct in my suspicions?

Cheers

Jonas

Submitted by Michael on Thu, 2021/05/20 - 07:37

#2

Try:

halt

Submitted by ploebb on Sat, 2021/05/22 - 21:01

#3

Thanks for the answer. halt does work. I think this should be in the FAQ: https://www.virtualhere.com/cloudhub_faq

I'll try answering my other question myself:
The OS of the Raspberry Pi CloudHub image identifies as an openwrt derivate:

root@CloudHub_50fd3f:~# cat /etc/os-release
NAME="CloudHub"
VERSION="1"
ID="cloudhub"
ID_LIKE="lede openwrt"
...

It's hard to find reliable information regarding SD corruption on openwrt, but as I mentioned above it seems that the writes to flash are down to an absolute minimum due to the tmpfs and read-only (squashfs) file systems. A read only SD card in combination with a RAM-Disk is also a common technique to prevent SD corruption on a Rasperry Pi.

So my conclusion is: a corruption due to power loss is not entirely impossible but it is highly unlikely.

If you are interested, you can look at the file systems with df -Th.

Submitted by Michael on Sat, 2021/05/22 - 21:03

#4

Yes cloudhub is just built using openwrt. That is correct regarding the sdcard issue with corruption. I suspect its very rare.