Questions regarding download progress

General Discussions
1

1. Querying download progress on the target device through dbus

We would like to display a progress bar on the screen of our device and are waiting of dbus progress query to be implemented. I found MEN-4201 but it seems implementation has not yet started. Can you estimate when this will be ready?

2. Querying download progress on the target device for tracking down issues

We understand that download progress query discussed in 1. will still take a bit. Is there a less polished, more hacky way available which we can utilize right now? I was told we are observing cases in which devices get stuck in the download stage for very long times. When we get hold of such a device, we would like to be able to take a closer look on what is going on. As I understand, download progress information is not leaving the mender client at all. That is even the logs produced by the mender client just say “download started” and “download finished” with nothing in between. Is there perhaps something like a secret mender client CLI option which would allow us to get more info?

3.) Deployment progress on hosted.mender.io.

We learned that during the download phase of a deployment, the progress bar is not tied to the actual amount of data transfered, but is simply a function of time. [1] [2]

May I ask you to disable this? I feel this does not add any value at all and is simply misleading. Collegues of mine were drawing conclusions based on this when trying to track down problems. It both consumes my effort and undermines menders credibility when I need to explaim them “no, what you see here is entirely made up.” It also provokes the question: What other data presented in the web user interface can they trust? The people doing deployments are not from the dev team and manage the deployments only as a side task.

After consulting the thread above I believe it is not the extrapolated value from the download start, but just some default value which is the same for absolutely any device served by mender, wether it be connected through some high speed link in $YOUR_FAVORITE_CAPITAL_CITY or some rusty 2-wire-link in the middle of nowhere. It can only be wrong.

As I see it, it’s not just that the download speed is wrong, it is also wrongly communicated that the download is still active at all.

Please seriously consider just disabling it. :frowning: Sometimes no info at all is better than misleading info.

2

@eystein can you comment here?

3

Hello @manuel_vps ,

Appreciate your feedback!

Re 1, you are looking at the right place, it’s the ticket that will enable you to get download progress via DBUS. We don’t have a timeline for it though, I would recommend that you watch that ticket for updates to stay up to date. And regarding 2, you could likely use Linux tools to see where Mender is writing (which offset) to the partition file of the inactive partition and compare that to the length of the file. Mender 2.6 has a remote terminal feature you could use to log into the device to do it. :slight_smile:

And 3- I agree we should consider removing it as it’s misleading. I will discuss internally.

4

Ad 1.
Great, I signed up for your issue tracker ad put a watch on that ticket.

Looking into the remote terminal feature is on our todo list for quite some time. Unfortunately internal things keep coming up so we weren’t yet able to set aside time for it. :confused:

Ad 2.
Good idea, that should help me a bit!

$ cat /proc/687705/fdinfo/36
pos:    26088
flags:  0100001

Ad 3.
Alright, thanks. :slight_smile: