Frequent hangs on ethernet only

  • This is somewhat counter-intuitive but:

    I have latest libreelec running on a Pi4/4g with offical PSU. When connected to ethernet it boots normally, accesses libraries and plays content exactly as expected. After (randomly) 2 or 3 videos played I would get a hang - always either when playback terminates and it's returning to the menu or going up one level within menus. I've looked on the forum(s) and see thread after thread referring to SD card/PSU/memory/OC/db size but with next to no solutions.

    In desperation (before burning yet another SD card) I changed my connection back to the on-board wifi. So far after an hour playing about in the system - not a single blip. It is (as expected) slower when navigating libraries because wifi but I'll take that over instability.

    The Pi's ethernet is not faulty - it's been in service as a general and desktop device for over a year on eth and been rock solid with many different OS's configured. I'm not going to invest a huge amount of time in this because I already kind of have, but it may be of interest to others that (at least for me) the "worse" solution works better.

    FWIW I suspect something in the Kodi code because I think I had this issue trying to run Kodi natively on Pi OS 64 and assumed it was the SD card being trashed by the high amount of logging from the OS. That was why I dedicated the Pi to a media server which it hardly needs tbh and installed Libreelec.

    I may try the native setup again and if it re-occurs, switch to wifi and see if it resolves there too. I wanted eth for *that use case* because I prefer to boot and run from NFS images off an SSD so that the SD card is removed from the loop. (side note: I wish libreelec used a standard boot config so I could run NFS root - I hate SD cards)

    If I do that I'll update this thread.

  • SDcards are not my favourite things either. But you can also boot from USB sticks and USB/SATA connected HDDs/SSDs.

    NFS boot... No idea if that is available for the RPi4 with LE10.

  • Hi - yes I can and do, but the thing is I'm then dedicating an SSD to that Pi and the smallest SSD I can buy is 120 gig when what I really need is max 8 gig root. On NFS I can allocate 10's of boot disks onto a single SSD - it satisfies my efficiency "itch". Closest alternative is a USB stick but that's still prone to failure with sustained heavy writes.

    Anyway I will repeat the native Kodi experiment and see if eth is an issue there too.