Hi all,
From some of the posts I have seen on the Ignition forum, I recently switched to Kubuntu for our HMI clients running Ignition. However, we are having widespread issues with "freezing" behavior. At first, we thought it was a heat issue, but now we are seeing the problem in cooler areas and the only units being affected are the Kubuntu clients.
Google is showing me results for a lot of "freezing" issues being reported with Kubuntu version 22.04 and 24.04. We are running 24.04 LTS.
I've seen posts that indicate people are using Kubuntu for Igniton. Can anyone tell me a version that you can be reported as stable? I am trying to get away from the headache of using plain Ubuntu, but we want to stay with Linux.
Any insight you might have on this would be helpful. Thanks.
I use Kubuntu 20.04 as my development workstation (my everything, really). No lockups or any other trouble.
I've been planning on updating to 22.04 in the near future to leverage some newer networking infrastructure for my local VMs and containers. I will keep an eye out for issues. (All of my servers are already 22.04, but headless.)
FWIW, I haven't deployed any HMIs with Kubuntu. I tend to select Xubuntu for the base XFCE libraries, then configure a custom Xsession that will launch full-screen Vision without any actual desktop environment. (Via auto-login. The XFCE desktop remains available for when intervention is needed.)
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Thanks for you input Phil. I will explore these paths and post back.
I believe most of ours have been Ubuntu 20.04 so far, but we did ship some systems out with Kubuntu 22.04 but they haven't been commissioned yet, so hopefully I don't get any calls about them freezing. I think when they were in our office they ran fine, but it's possible it's hardware related too and not necessarily the OS.
What OS and hardware were you using before? Did you change hardware when going to Kubuntu or just the OS? Are all your power saving features turned off? How often are they freezing?
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I am using Dell OptiPlex 3000 Thin clients with 8GB RAM and a Pentium N6005. System resources are barely being used from what I can see in the system monitor. I did not change hardware. I was using Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 previously. They freeze intermittently but they are also used intermittently so I think the freezing is pretty frequently, but not enough for me to witness it more than a few times.
If you do a google search you can see a lot of reported issues with Kubuntu 22.04 and some with 24.04. From what I have been able to read about so far, it seems to be related to graphics. I've read the fix on 22.04 was updating the MESA libraries, and that the update to 23.10 fixed the issue for most because it contains the updated MESA. But it seems to still be an issue in 24.04.
I've also read that switching from Wayland to x11 is a fix. This is what I am going to try next.
I'm a linux noob but I've been going down the rabbit hole now...
Indeed. I use X11, not Wayland. (On 20.04, Wayland doesn't support multiple monitors.)
Out of curiosity are you running Vision or Perspective? We have some OnLogic CL250s that were running Perspective on with Ubuntu 20.04 and with 8gb RAM and a Quad-Core Intel Celeron J3455 processor they seem as if they lag a bit as far as screens loading. But that could just be me having unrealistic expectations with not having used this small of a client before. Just curious what others experience is with this type of stuff.
Is this just a client? I would expect that to be a decent client. But if Edge or otherwise including the gateway, I would think that was woefully underpowered.
Yes just a client, the screens have a PID style plant floor layout which is the main screen that takes some time to load, it has probably a dozen SVGs embedded in it which is what i was thinking may be the problem. But when navigating to a different view every window seems to take a 2-5 seconds to load. All I have this to compare to is previous Vision and Perspective clients running on a i5 or i7. So that's where I think I am having unrealistic expectations for loading times since my previous experience has always been instantaneous navigation.
I'm not the most savvy when it comes to computer specs and the performance of them. Mainly because I have never really had to spec them out before now.
What would be nice is maybe some sort of benchmark where Passmark CPU scores are used to determine the performance of a gateway and/or clients. This way it would help everyone decipher various models, CPUs, etc into realistic expectations.
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I agree that would be awesome.
I misspoke. x11 is what was installed natively with Kubuntu 24.04. I switched to Wayland, and after 24 hours so far so good.