Upgraded the homeserver OS to devuan beowulf and replaced the UPS battery / 2022-07-07

A few days ago I noticed some interesting messages in the apcupsd log:

2022-07-04 10:14:15 +0200  Battery disconnected.
2022-07-04 10:16:24 +0200  Battery reattached.
2022-07-04 10:19:53 +0200  Battery disconnected.
2022-07-04 10:20:40 +0200  Battery reattached.

Checking the UPS statistics showed me the battery charge was dropping to about 7 % of the capacity while the mains power was available. Since the battery was over 5 years old I ordered a new one to replace it.

This battery was scheduled to arrive Wednesday at the start of the afternoon and I wanted to do an upgrade of the Linux distribution on the main homeserver conway anyway because devuan ascii is already 'oldoldstable' (but still getting updates).

The homeserver uses 2 disks with the main lvm volume in a raid-1. The /boot and /boot/efi filesystems are mirrored by hand with the idea to end with a working boot even when 1 disk is missing.

After the shutdown and replacing the UPS battery I switched the server on again and I was greeted by a grub prompt and nothing to boot. After a few tries I got the system booting again, after that I went searching for what went wrong. Eventually I found out the file /boot/efi/EFI/devuan/grub.cfg pointed at a missing filesystem. I found out the best way to fix this is with

# dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64

both with /dev/sda and /dev/sdb filesystems on /boot and /boot/efi.

I was hoping the complete upgrade made my rcu_sched problems go away which have caused serious problems before but they haven't gone away.

Again I see this in a virtual machine:

[62988.027890] rcu: INFO: rcu_sched detected stalls on CPUs/tasks:
[62988.036492] rcu:     0-...!: (1 GPs behind) idle=656/1/0x4000000000000002 softirq=592140/600579 fqs=0
[62988.036943] rcu:     (detected by 0, t=2 jiffies, g=2877673, q=701)
[62988.037327] NMI backtrace for cpu 0

But this time I see on the hardware:

[63178.224120] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[63178.224211] ata1.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE EXT
[63178.224255] ata1.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 3
                        res 40/00:01:06:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[63178.224351] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[63178.224379] ata1: hard resetting link
[63183.576100] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[63183.696118] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[63183.696333] ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve [\_SB.PCI0.SAT1.SPT0._GTF.DSSP], AE_NOT_FOUND (20180810/psargs-330)
[63183.696400] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed \_SB.PCI0.SAT1.SPT0._GTF, AE_NOT_FOUND (20180810/psparse-516)
[63183.696597] ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve [\_SB.PCI0.SAT1.SPT0._GTF.DSSP], AE_NOT_FOUND (20180810/psargs-330)
[63183.696634] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed \_SB.PCI0.SAT1.SPT0._GTF, AE_NOT_FOUND (20180810/psparse-516)
[63183.696717] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[63183.696732] ata1.00: retrying FLUSH 0xea Emask 0x4
[63183.696772] ata1: EH complete

which suggests to me I should try whether using a different channel from SATA1 would change things.

Update 2022-10-05: I rebooted the server again for kernel upgrades and to get access again to a usb device which became unavailable after interference and the grub-efi settings are fine again: the machine boots and everything comes up fine.