Command apt-get upgrade crashes Raspbian

Question

The image file I am using is quite old. How old exactly I am not sure, because this image I have inherited from previous developer.

I have learnt that running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Kills the Raspberry Pi. I checked memory consumption with htop, and at the last moment the system was responding I had 10 megabytes left (including swap). Then everything went readonly, the upgrade crashed, not a single command was working (I typed ls, ls command not found, cat, cat command not found). I had to reboot.

I increased swap size to 512 megabytes, and it seemed it helped a little, but Raspbian crashed on later into the installation.

I would like to hear from you guys:

• Did you have a similar error?
• How do I solve it?
• Is there a way to install only some packages and not all of them in one go?

Typical stdout from apt-get upgrade looks like this:

Unpacking replacement python2.7-minimal ...
Preparing to replace idle-python2.7 2.7.3-6 (using .../idle-python2.7_2.7.3-6+deb7u2_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement idle-python2.7 ...
Preparing to replace initramfs-tools 0.109.1 (using .../initramfs-tools_0.115~bpo70+1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement initramfs-tools ...
Preparing to replace libclutter-1.0-common 1.10.8-2 (using .../libclutter-1.0-common_1.10.8-2+rpi1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libclutter-1.0-common ...
Preparing to replace libcogl-common 1.10.2-7 (using .../libcogl-common_1.10.2-7+rpi1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libcogl-common ...
Preparing to replace libglib2.0-data 2.33.12+really2.32.4-5 (using .../libglib2.0-data_2.40.0-3rpi3rpi1_all.deb) ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:tee: deployment.log: Read-only file system
Etee: deployment.log: Read-only file system: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

Some people have requested df -h:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           15G  2.4G   12G  18% /
/dev/root        15G  2.4G   12G  18% /
devtmpfs        212M     0  212M   0% /dev
tmpfs            44M  236K   44M   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            88M     0   88M   0% /run/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1   56M   19M   38M  33% /boot

Answer 1

Did you have a similar error?

Yes, if I don't take care to avoid it.

How do I solve it?

1. Use top to make sure you have stopped all CPU or RAM consuming services. For example,

   /etc/init.d/lighttpd stop
   

2. Prefix your upgrade command with nice.

3. Sometimes upgrading breaks, or the img breaks, and you just need to re-install, so keep an install log and backup files you created.

Is there a way to install only some packages and not all of them in one go?

Yes,

sudo nice apt-get install PACKAGE-TO-BE-UPGRADED

Answer 2

As far as I can tell there is no easy solution. If the Pi wasn't upgraded regularly there is a great deal of chance that running generic sudo apt-get upgrade will kill it. Adding nice or releasing as much memory as possible helps mitigate but not really solves the problem. I tried to create a bash script that first reads packages that require update, and then upgrade them one at a time as a subprocess. On paper I understood it will solve it, in practice, not really (however it might be that bash script worked differently than I thought), for a reference below:

DATA=$(apt-get upgrade -s -y -q | grep "Inst " | cut -d ' ' -f 2)

PACKAGES=(${DATA// / })
Z=0

for package in "${PACKAGES[@]}";
do
    echo ""
    echo ""
    echo "apt-get install -y -q $package"
    bash -c "nice apt-get install -y -q $package"
    bash -c "nice apt-get clean -y -q"

    Z=$((Z+1))

    # update only first 50 packages, just to be sure that we won't kill pi by running this script
    if [[ $Z -eq 50 ]];
    then
        break
    fi
done

Answer 3

Check your SD card against this list. I bought two of the same cards at the same time and had the same issue, only to find my make and model were listed as Not OK on this list.