I am consistently having a problem with hard lockups that occur every few days to every few weeks. I am reasonably confident I have isolated it to the ivtv driver. The problem was not present in 0.4.8. It is present in 0.8.2, 0.9.1, 0.10.1, 0.10.2 and 0.10.3. Other than that, I cannot say exactly when the problem appeared.
For info, I have two PVR-250 MCE’s and one PVR-500 MCE. I also make a fair amount of recordings; between 4 and 10 a day. The lockups only occur at the very start of a recording; if the recording starts successfully, everything is good until the next recording tries to start.. After a lockup and a hard reboot of the box, there is never anything in the logs or other messages to indicate what the problem might have been: Just a ‘B’ (zero length) file for the recording that failed to start properly. I tried to work my way out of the problem with hardware and software changes. Hardware-wise I’ve changed pretty much everything in the box except the video hard drive, which is itself a recent WD 500G SATA drive. I’ve also made all of the software changes and tweaks I could find documented in the mailing list archives and the wiki. For the record, the following is a chronology of the biggest hardware and software changes that I made and how they did or did not effect the problem: 0.4.8, FC3, 2.6.15, Sempron 64 2600, NF3-250, 2G DDR-400, jfs – perfect in every way except choppy HD playback from the slave backend. 0.4.8, FC3, 2.6.15, Pentium D-820, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, jfs – perfect in every way 0.10.1, FC6, 2.6.19, Pentium D-820, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, jfs – poor video quality, intermittent lockups 0.10.2, FC6, 2.6.19, Pentium D-820, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, jfs – poor video quality, intermittent lockups 0.10.2, FC6, 2.6.19, Pentium D-820, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, ext3 – poor video quality, intermittent lockups 0.10.3, FC6, 2.6.19, Pentium D-820, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, ext3 – excellent video quality, intermittent lockups 0.10.3, FC6, 2.6.19, Core 2 Duo E6420, NForce 650i, 2G DDR2-800, ext3 – intermittent lockups 0.10.3, FC6, 2.6.20, Core 2 Duo, E6420, NForce 650i, 2G DDR2-800, ext3, maxcpus=1 - ran 23 days before locking up. 0.10.3, FC6, 2.6.20, Core 2 Duo, E6420, NForce 650i, 2G DDR2-800, ext3 – locked up after three days. The slave backend is similar (FC6, 2.6.19, E4300, Intel 865, 2G DDR-400, jfs) except that it doesn’t have IVTV installed and it has not suffered a single lockup or failure to record throughout the same period. At this point, my best option appears to be to go back to 0.4.8. Unfortunately, going back to 0.4.8 means going back to a kernel version <= 2.6.15 which won’t support my current motherboard, so I have kinda painted myself into an upgrade corner. I’ll either have to buy yet another new motherboard, one with a 945 chipset perhaps, or I’ll have to do a big hardware round-robin to free up an older chipset motherboard for the Myth box, one that certainly won’t support HD playback. That leaves me back where I started. My only other option is to replace the video partition hard drive. In the meantime, while I think about what course to take, I would appreciate any suggestions on ways to further troubleshoot or isolate the problem. Downgrading might fix my stability problem but, even if it does, it won’t help fix the driver. Bill _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
