Balena Supervisor starting randomly even if container is running

Product support balenaOS
1

My device is running BalenaOS 2.84.5 and Supervisor version 12.10.3. Using Supervisor version 14.11.9 gives the same result.

[CMD] in the service is set to run a start-script at startup which has a balena-idle at the end of it.

When the device has been running for a while, this shows up in the log:

...
2023-09-08T10:23:09  main  Idling...
2023-09-08T10:33:09  main  Idling...
2023-09-08T11:45:01 Supervisor starting
(*start-script runs again)

It says Supervisor starting and the service becomes unusable. The container isn’t restarted, it just stops communicating with the device hardware. Isn’t the Supervisor only supposed to be started at device startup? The starts seem random to me since I don’t know why they occur.

Expected behavior would be that the Supervisor is started when the device is powered on and starts the service. Once the service is up and running, the Supervisor should not affect the service unless a command from balena is sent.

Is there any way to stop the Supervisor from starting randomly or is there a way to live with it and keep the container running even if Supervisor is starting?

I would really appreiate any support or input on this.
Best regards,

3

Hello @tmadat first of all welcome to the balena community!

I have some questions here:

  • is this behaviour happening in all the devices of your fleet?
  • what do you mean when you say the device has been running for a while? is this some days, some seconds, some hours, …?
  • could you please confirm what are you running on the start-script?
  • finally, what’s your device type?

Thanks

4

Hi,

Great questions. I see now that the problem is not very well defined and that I have some work to do before I can answer them properly.

This behavior is happening to all devices in the fleet and it happens within an hour after the startup. The problem has gotten worse since the power supply to the devices has started to drop in current and voltage more often. Maybe there is a hardware error that has to be solved rather than balena, since no one else here seems to have encountered this problem. How is the Supervisor supposed to work, does it keep running after the start or does it go into a sleep mode until a command is sent from balena?

The device is an STM32MP1 with cortex-A7 and cortex-M4.