Hi Simen, Rey, List,

> Hi Michael, Rey,
>
> I have not seen any new replies to this, nor anything from any  
> developers. As I wrote in my problem report, I've been an ivtv-user  
> for a while, but only recently subscribed to the list - thus I  
> don't know what to expect from developer interest and such.
>
> Still - assuming the developers are reading the list and and are  
> interested in the problem, I thought I'd try to summarise our  
> systems so that we can get similarities or differences sorted out.
>
> My system (as previously written) is an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe  
> motherboard, with an Athlon64 X2 chip, running in i386 mode, with  
> ivtv 0.7.0 on a 2.6.17.6 kernel.
>

My system:
ASUS A8V (VIA-chipset).
tried kernel 2.6.14 and 2.6.15 (I cannot use >=2.6.16 because of  
missing support from dmraid)
tried ivtv-0.4.x

The best results I got with 0.4.0. The system stays up for about 2  
days. The worst case comes with 0.4.5. ivtv crashes after about 10  
minutes.

>
> This means
> -NForce4 (I would not thing that mobo brand or chipset features  
> matter too much)
> -SMP (This may be important. I've run my card with ivtv-0.4.x  
> 'forever' in UP-mode on older kernels without issues)
> -kernel 2.6.17 + ivtv 0.7.0
>
>
> Michael;
> From your mail, I understand you are running an A8V board (That  
> would be a ViA K8T800pro-board, right?). Are you running an X2 CPU  
> in SMP on this? In i386 and not x86-64 mode?
>

Yes, it is the A8V with the mentioned chipset. I do not have an X2  
CPU and tried both, SMP and not SMP. I tried a fresh x86 install and  
a x86-64 install. I still have both of them on my drive so I can test  
them both.
2 weeks ago I put my old HD from my PIII mythbox into this PC and  
tested with this. For two days I could run the system without one  
error. Unfortunately I had a disk headcrash and the working system is  
now away (I know I'm too lazy with backups).


> Also, you're writing that ivtv 'crashes' - are we talking about the  
> same DMA error;
> warning: ENC: (0) DMA Error 0x0000000b
> reported some or many times during a capture?
>


> The actual error number may be important, altho I don't know what  
> it signifies.
>
>

Right. It is the same Error and also the number matches. The message  
appears just as the System load goes up. For example when running one  
recording and mythcommflag or running 2 recordings and watching one  
at the same time. I couldn't find a certain point of CPU load causing  
the problems. Probably the DMA-access from the hard disk and the ivtv- 
cards at the same time are disturbing each other.


> Altho my errors were a lot less frequent that I have seen others  
> report, they never caused ivtv to stop working, nor impaired system  
> stability.
>
>
>
My system throws out some DMA errors and then the one:

ivtv: DMA still pending while stopping capture.

After this message the card is unusable and I have to reboot the  
system. Unloading and reloading the ivtv module doesn't help.


>
> Rey;
> You write that you have the same setup as I have. Could you please  
> expand on that?
> Did the patch work for you as well as it does for me?
>

Of course the patch works well since DMA for the ivtv-cards is  
totally switched off. Unfortunately its not a solution for me since I  
cannot watch any recordings when both cards are capturing because of  
the CPU load.

>
>
>
> So - assuming Michael is experiencing the same problem I am, it  
> would seem that his is /not/ a chipset issue (or, if it is, both  
> NForce4 and K8T800pro chipsets are affected), but the common line  
> is that it applies to Athlon64 CPUs, possibly SMP setups.
>

I agree with the chipsets but its not the SMP setup.


>
> From my own experience from my own setup, I feel pretty confident  
> that the the main change I introduced was the SMP CPU. I see others  
> have reported this issue with other kernels and ivtv-versions, but  
> good information is typically missing.
>
> With a little spare time, I will build an UP kernel and give that a  
> spin with an unmodified ivtv-driver. Given that my errors never  
> were very frequent, testing will take time to be conclusive.
>


I did some more testing but couldn't find out any setups working fine.

As mentioned above I think it could have to do something with the DMA  
transfers of the hard disks. I am using a SATA I -Raid 0 setup. Are  
you using SATA and/or RAID?

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need some more information.  
Currently I'm not at home so I cannot do any testing for the next week.

Michael


_______________________________________________
ivtv-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users

Reply via email to