Advanced users • Pi Zero W kernel panic on Ansible driven first upgrade

Good afternoon,

Twice in two days I've hit a kernel panic on an Ansible driven first upgrade of RpiOS packages. A rough outline of the process is

• Copy image to an SD card using Imager
• Perform some further customizations to the base image (both boot and root partitions) using Ansible.
• Boot
• Perform further customizations, again using Ansible

The First (Ansible) task is to `apt update` and the second and third list upgradeable packages before the fourth performs and the upgrade (update/upgrade using the Ansible apt module) During the last step (listed) the Pi reports the null pointer exception and stops. It comes back up when I cycle power. The first time I could execute an `apt upgrade` w/out complaint. the second time it required that the previous upgrade be completed by running `sudo dpkg --configure -a`. The displays report a null pointer each time but other details differ.

I suspect that Ansible (using Python) tickles something in the kernel that provokes this. I hold the belief that nothing in user space should result in a null pointer in the kernel, but I'm open to being told differently. One of the dumps can be viewed at https://photos.app.goo.gl/cZWRt789fEXVH5oB7

I'm wondering if I should file an issue regarding this. For all I know, this might have been fixed and just not yet baked into the install images. Second, managing Raspberry Pis using Ansible is a bit of a corner case.

I can connect a serial monitor and capture the debug output on another PC (providing more than a picture of the screen) but I'm reluctant to put the effort in (both on my part and the engineers that need to triage the report) if it's not going to benefit.

I'm open to suggestions.

best,

Statistics: Posted by HankB — Tue Jan 21, 2025 8:48 pm — Replies 0 — Views 42

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