Varnish on a pi

Thu Jan 3 03:19:15 CET 2013

Hi,

I've trying to install Varnish on a Raspberry pi. This has been discussed on their own forums with a general view of "it simply doesn't work", so I set about finding why.

Some info:
pi at raspberrypi ~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #4 PREEMPT Fri Dec 28 16:14:38 EST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux
pi at raspberrypi ~ $ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        497132     284352     212780          0      63616     180780
-/+ buffers/cache:      39956     457176
Swap:       102396          0     102396

Image is the Debian port "raspbian", updated from repositories as of today.

I initially assumed the repositories were the issue and obtained varnish-3.0.3 from source. The install is fairly default, documented here:

sudo apt-get install automake libtool
sh autogen.sh
sh configure
make
sudo make install
sudo vi /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl
Setup backend servers..
sudo ldconfig -n /usr/local/lib/

Varnish however, appears to crash and burn:

pi at raspberrypi ~ $ sudo /usr/local/sbin/varnishd -f /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,16M -a 172.31.1.50:80 -d
Platform: Linux,3.2.27+,armv6l,-sfile,-smalloc,-hcritbit
200 233
-----------------------------
Varnish Cache CLI 1.0
-----------------------------
Linux,3.2.27+,armv6l,-sfile,-smalloc,-hcritbit

Type 'help' for command list.
Type 'quit' to close CLI session.
Type 'start' to launch worker process.

start
child (19755) Started

Pushing vcls failed:
CLI communication error (hdr)
Stopping Child
200 0

Child (19755) died signal=11
Child cleanup complete
quit
500 22
Closing CLI connection

In order to follow the recommended process here https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/DebuggingVarnish, I reconfigured with --enable-debugging-symbols --enable-diagnostics.

I went back and forth between a "default" install and "diagnostic" install three different times to confirm this, because I appreciate it doesn't seem plausible. Regrettably, the situation experienced is that I have a fix: Compile in diagnostic mode. With the above configure options (I ran make clean between each new build) the Varnish service appeared to operate fine.

Whilst I could just leave diagnostics on, I'm assuming there's load associated with this. I've pasted below an strace of the crashed system, but I'm just not sure how else I can debug in this situation. Is there anything else that the diagnostics mode does that could possibly get involved here?

[pid 18164] clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME,  <unfinished ...>
[pid 18166] <... nanosleep resumed> NULL) = 0
[pid 18166] mmap2(NULL, 65536, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x45e00000
[pid 18166] mprotect(0x45e00000, 4096, PROT_NONE) = 0
[pid 18166] clone(Process 18173 attached (waiting for parent)
Process 18173 resumed (parent 18166 ready)
child_stack=0x45e0efa8, flags=CLONE_VM|CLONE_FS|CLONE_FILES|CLONE_SIGHAND|CLONE_THREAD|CLONE_SYSVSEM|CLONE_SETTLS|CLONE_PARENT_SETTID|CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID, parent_tidptr=0x45e0f4d8, tls=0x45e0f930, child_tidptr=0x45e0f4d8) = 18173
[pid 18173] set_robust_list(0x45e0f4e0, 0xc) = 0
[pid 18173] clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, {1357176395, 646464764}) = 0
[pid 18173] futex(0x45e0ebd4, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 1, NULL <unfinished ...>
[pid 18166] nanosleep({0, 2000000},  <unfinished ...>
[pid 18164] <... clock_gettime resumed> {1357176395, 642222934}) = 0
[pid 18164] --- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
Process 18164 detached
[pid 18173] +++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

Below you can see the syslog that covers me starting varnish twice, once with a default configure, once with the diagnostics enabled.

Jan  3 12:54:27 raspberrypi varnishd[26807]: Platform: Linux,3.2.27+,armv6l,-smalloc,-smalloc,-hcritbit
Jan  3 12:54:27 raspberrypi varnishd[26807]: child (26808) Started
Jan  3 12:54:27 raspberrypi varnishd[26807]: Child (26808) died signal=11
Jan  3 12:54:27 raspberrypi varnishd[26807]: Child (-1) said Child starts
Jan  3 13:05:04 raspberrypi varnishd[31536]: Platform: Linux,3.2.27+,armv6l,-smalloc,-smalloc,-hcritbit
Jan  3 13:05:04 raspberrypi varnishd[31536]: child (31537) Started
Jan  3 13:05:04 raspberrypi varnishd[31536]: Child (31537) said Child starts

Finally, some info from the config log.

pi at raspberrypi ~/varnish-3.0.3 $ grep -i warn config.log
cc1: warning: command line option '-fno-rtti' is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C [enabled by default]
configure:13219: WARNING: xsltproc not found - not building documentation
configure:13279: WARNING: rst2man not found - not building man pages
configure:13342: WARNING: rst2html not found - not building changelog
conftest.c:40:6: warning: conflicting types for built-in function 'cos' [enabled by default]
configure:14290: WARNING: libedit not found, disabling libedit support
conftest.c:72:6: warning: conflicting types for built-in function 'vprintf' [enabled by default]
configure:15220: WARNING: won't look for sendfile() on armv6l-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
conftest.c:68:3: warning: left shift count >= width of type [enabled by default]
conftest.c:68:3: warning: left shift count >= width of type [enabled by default]
conftest.c:69:10: warning: left shift count >= width of type [enabled by default]
conftest.c:69:10: warning: left shift count >= width of type [enabled by default]

Sorry for the long post - but hopefully it gives us something to go on. Any information would be appreciated.

-Josh.
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