After the last error, I turned off VBI in mythtv and repeated the test, again using 2.6.24-rc6. This time it ran about 6 hours before failing. As usual, the hang seem to result from loss of disk I/O on the root partition. The mouse pointer moves and the system reponds to pings, but the system is otherwise unresponsive. With VBI turned off, the error messages prior to the hang have changed again:
kernel: ivtv0: All encoder MPG stream buffers are full. Dropping data. kernel: ivtv0: Cause: the application is not reading fast enough. kernel: ivtv1: All encoder MPG stream buffers are full. Dropping data. kernel: ivtv1: Cause: the application is not reading fast enough. After the last failure I ran an overnight stress test with the tuners idle, and saw no problems. The progression seems to be that while the failure gets rarer, the consequences become more severe. The first symptoms, a few months ago, were interrupted recordings, followed by disabled drivers, then finally loss of disk I/O. It now occurs only under prolonged periods of high system load, which means the average user would probably never see it. For future tests I am planning to put my root partition on another drive, to see if that allows better logging and recovery. _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
