Node-RED 5.0.5 crashes with "Illegal instruction" (SIGILL) on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

General
1

I'm seeing a reproducible crash after upgrading from Node-RED 5.0.4 to 5.0.5 on two separate Raspberry Pi 4 Model B units (Rev 1.1 and Rev 1.2, both aarch64/Cortex-A72).

Environment:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (both Rev 1.1 and Rev 1.2)
  • Architecture: aarch64
  • Node.js: v22.23.2
  • Node-RED: 5.0.5 (crashes), 5.0.4 (works fine)

Symptom:

Running node-red --version or starting the service results in:

Illegal instruction

Via systemd, the service shows:

Main PID: XXXX (code=killed, signal=ILL)

The service enters a restart loop (activating (auto-restart)).

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Have Node-RED 5.0.4 running on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with Node.js 22.x
  2. sudo npm uninstall -g node-red
  3. sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm node-red@5.0.5
  4. Run node-red --version or start the systemd service

Result: Immediate crash with SIGILL on both devices.

Workaround: Downgrading back to node-red@5.0.4 with the same Node.js 22.23.2 resolves the issue completely; the service runs stable.

Notable: The same 5.0.5 version runs without issue on a Raspberry Pi 5 (Cortex-A76) in my setup, which points toward an ARM instruction-set incompatibility (possibly a native dependency using CPU features not present on Cortex-A72) rather than a general Node-RED bug.

Happy to provide more diagnostic info (cpuinfo, journalctl logs, etc.) if useful.

2

I suspect this is related: Node-Red service fails to start with 5.0.5 · Issue #5919 · node-red/node-red · GitHub

If you want, you could try reinstalling 5.0.5 & recompiling bcrypt from source

npm rebuild bcrypt --build-from-source
3

5.0.6 has just been published that reverts the dependency update that caused this.

4

Thanks both for the quick response! Can confirm 5.0.6 is out and works fine on my Raspberry Pi 4 Model B — upgraded from 5.0.4 straight to 5.0.6 and the service starts without issues, no more SIGILL crash. Appreciate the fast fix!