Graeme Wilford wrote:

>The usual cause of instability-over-time when moving from an otherwise
>stable 0.2 setup to 0.3 is the new dynamic buffer allocation. This
>could bite anyone due to the fragmentation of kernel memory pools over
>time but appears to be more common on systems with small amounts of
>RAM (512Mb or less). Asking the kernel to kmalloc() a contiguous 8Mb
>chunk of memory can and does fail even if 100s of Mb is being used for
>buffers and cache and is generally available for kernel and user
>apps...
>
>Use the ivtv_dynbuf=0 driver option as mentioned below.
>
>Should we perhaps change the *default* to static buffer allocation?
>This problem appears to crop up time and again...
>
Thanks for the great explaination. 

My box does in fact have only 512Mb of RAM (i figured that would be
ample).  I put in that option last night and I spent a fair amount of
time testing and sure enough this appears to have fixed the system
freezes. 

Thanks again for your help.

As for make this a default setting, it might be a good idea.  If not,
maybe mentioning it in the install.txt or possibly including a FAQ? 




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