Ethernet Problems Raspberry Pi 4

Hi All,

I am going bananas here. In short, I'm experiencing an odd behaviour with my RPi4 (1Gb) flashed with LibreElec 9.2 and Ethernet dropouts (at least I think).

It's hard to explain really, never experienced something similar. So I installed LlibreElec and enabled SSH, all is good. SCP'ed my advancedsettings.xml (same one I use every else) which points to my rather big meta library. I rebooted expecting to see thumbnails, etc., but I see nothing in the library. Ok I thought, what's the deal?!? and then google pointed me to an option to allow LibreElec to wait until the network is up before starting Kodi, but I never had to do that. So I enabled and rebooted, and it brings up library but the RPi4 freezes almost immediately, then blank screen (as though it detected the Ethernet being down), then Kodi starts up again and freezes, continues to do this. Meanwhile the LEDs (orange/green) turn on and both go off, and it repeats this.

I tried Raspbian buster and LEDs seem normal and no Ethernet issues at all, as far as I could tell seems to only happen with LibreElec only. I also noticed Raspbian idling at around 40 degrees on my setup and LibreElec above 50.

I'm using a certified RPi4 power supply (5.1V 3.5A), attached is the crashlog.

Another thing I noticed that's truly bizarre is that I when I shutdown LibreElec, the Ethernet LEDs continue to blink it that same on/off pattern (both orange/green at the same time). WTF....

vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0x0

Please, any suggestions would be appreciative.

Thank you

Quote from Iridium

It looks like a memory issue - probably caused by your "massive" DB being loaded into a mere 1G RAM. (How big is your library?)

50^o is about normal for RPi4 at idle.

Try adding a Swapfile and see if that helps, if so it might be possible to eliminate the issue whilst the system is usable.

Thanks for the reply, I don't it's that but I'm willing to give it a shot anyway. I'm using a shared DB across the network and running both a RPi2/3 fine.

If it's memory why would have problems even connecting to my mysql instance on boot up at all.

I don't understand what's going on here.

Quote from Klojum

I don't think that an entire database is ever loaded into internal memory.

Loading a humongous number of movies or music artists into a Kodi listing might take its toll though.

Should I try adding a Swapfile? I mean, I never have do it on the RPi2/3's that I already have on my network...

Quote from Klojum

The RPi2 has 512MB internal memory, of which Kodi takes up roughly half. So I don't think a swap file will help, also because a SDcard will be painfully slow handling a swap file.

Ethernet drop outs I saw once or twice on my RPi4-4GB with Raspbian running the Kodi application doing some 4K video. This happened with Kodi's internal NFS mounts which is usually okay. You could try to create system mounts in LibreELEC instead, and point Kodi to those mounts for your source(s).

Thanks but what worries me is this line:

ERROR: Create - Error( Network is unreachable )

and why it's there at all and the fact it can't connect to my db over the network.

Yet if I load raspbian buster and attempt to connect via the command line to the same mariadb - no problems.

At first I thought it was hardware or bad PS, but as I said, with Raspbian, the Ethernet LEDs remain solid and I don't notice this odd on/off blinking pattern as I do with LibreElec.

The problem looks more driver related with LibreElec, but if this was the case I would image it to be a more widespread issue but it doesn't appear to be the case.

Quote from Klojum

LibreELEC has a "Wait for network" option. Has that been enabled?

If the network is not up yet (because LibreELEC may have booted too quickly), then the database connection will also likely fail.

Yes, I've already tried that option but I noticed something odd while doing so.

When I enabled it and rebooted, it DOES bring up library but the RPi4 freezes almost immediately, then black screen (as though it detected the Ethernet being down) while the message "waiting for network..." is displayed, then Kodi starts up again and freezes, continues to do this. Meanwhile the LEDs (orange/green) turn on and both go off, and it repeats this. Sometimes, it just freezes on boot and I have to hard reset it.

Could this be the issue concerning the freezing: PI4 - freeze on scrolling lists

EDIT: I did try CMA=64M, GPU_MEM=192M as I read within that thread, but still have the same issue...

EDIT2: I didn't realize that the CMA thing needs to be cmdline.txt not config.txt. Now it doesn't freeeze anymore.

EDIT3: Nope, played a video stop it, and the menu freeze again, argh....