Kernel version on 8.10 was/is: 2.6.24 - 30-generic Loading Mythbuntu version 8.10 results in a rock solid system and all three of my PVR150's are happy as clams. Input change between them, and channel change all day without so much as one single hiccup.
The CPU imbalance may be due to the fact that it is a hyperthreaded P4 processor. Based on some reading I did on the PVR150's that another user pointed me toward, there was a theory postulated that P4's with hyperthreading enabled would cause some issues. I tried this, and it seemed to improve things until I started switching channels on one of the other PVR150's. Then I got the same distorted images. I thought I was really onto something there, but I would not be that lucky. I am leaving it off until I track the source of this issue down. Ivtv version running under 8.10 is 1.1.0 The nVidia card is only in the backend so I can have a local frontend for testing. Once the backend is stable, the high performance video card would come out and be replaced by a passively cooled card. I get the same sort of processor imbalance with 8.10 loaded running "cat /proc/interrupts" and hyperthreading enabled. I have tried to adjust the latency timer values on the PVR150's while running under Mythbuntu 11.04, but the 'setpci' command has no effect. I issued the command "sudo setpci -v -s 03:03.0 latency-timer=70", but the timer comes back under "lspci -v" with the same value as before the setpci command. This same command, however, works under version 8.10. Strange.... I am trying to now run ivtv with enhanced logging and see what that brings. What do I look for in the v4l2-ctl --log-status output to know if the card is working properly? Can I track the other cards using that command? How? I will need more time to track down and use the other suggestions you gave, as I have to learn to use them first. But I will get there. Thanks for your help so far. -----Original Message----- From: Andy Walls [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 8:25 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ivtv-users] Help With Troubleshooting On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 18:39 -0600, [email protected] wrote: > ==============Original message text=============== On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 > 9:40:11 pm CST Andy Walls wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >>Hello, > >>I have two servers running Mythbuntu 11.04 and MythTV 0.24.1. > >>I have > >>three PVR-150 tuners in the server configured as a slave backend, > >>and some digital tuners in the master backend. The problem I have > >>is that whenever the analog tuners are called for by any frontend > >>(even a local one), I get distorted video, with stuttering and image > >>freezes. There is currently a bug report in with MythTV on a > >> Analog Channel Change issue. > >>I have tried the work-a-round (tune a digital channel before using > >>one of the analog tuners), but it does not work for me. I finally > >>saw some troubleshooting steps for IVTV drivers, and followed some > >>of those steps. > >>The one that caught my attention, is the cat /dev/video1 > > >>test.mpg test. I looked at the file that was produced while the > >>command was active, and VLC would only play a few seconds of the > >>file and then skip to the end, and then terminate the viewing > >>window. The video jumped and was distorted, just the same as it was > >>in MythTV. So the issue, evidently, is not MythTV, but perhaps with > >>IVTV or some related item. > >>On a related note, the same hardware works without issues, when > >>running MythTV 0.21 under Mythbuntu 8.10. > >>What would you do next and where would you look for a>>resolution? > >>Thanks, > >>Jeff > >What are the kernel versions shown with uname -a? > Linux MYTHBE2 2.6.38-13-generic #54-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 3 13:44:52 UTC > 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux OK, fairly modern; that's good. Do you happen to know the kernel version under Mythbuntu 8.10? (so I check the differences between the two kernels) > >What are the ivtv-driver versions shown with v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video1 > >--log-status? > ivtv1: Version: 1.4.2 Card: Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 OK, good. > >What other devices are shown sharing the interrupt lines with ivtv > >using cat /proc/interrupts? > CPU0 CPU1 > 0: 580 0 IO-APIC-edge timer > 1: 3649 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042 > 6: 3 0 IO-APIC-edge floppy > 7: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge parport0 > 8: 1 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc0 > 9: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi > 14: 63335 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix > 15: 1294927 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix > 16: 7153671 2827260 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb5, > nvidia > 17: 12238 7179 IO-APIC-fasteoi ivtv1 > 18: 5690498 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ata_piix, uhci_hcd:usb4,eth0, > Ensoniq AudioPCI > 19: 74042 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb3, ivtv2 > 22: 1829 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ivtv0 > 23: 3 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1 > NMI: 0 0 Non-maskable interrupts > LOC: 14667959 15620982 Local timer interrupts > SPU: 0 0 Spurious interrupts > PMI: 0 0 Performance monitoring interrupts > IWI: 0 0 IRQ work interrupts > RES: 2407721 2344290 Rescheduling interrupts > CAL: 789 2664 Function call interrupts > TLB: 13663 20105 TLB shootdowns > TRM: 0 0 Thermal event interrupts > THR: 0 0 Threshold APIC interrupts > MCE: 0 0 Machine check exceptions > MCP: 540 540 Machine check polls > ERR: 0 > MIS: 0 This looks pretty imbalanced: CPU0 handles a lot more of the interrupt service than CPU1. This imbalance of CPU0 handling most of the hardware interrupts might be a source of problems, *if* CPU0 is actually busy with higher priority interrupts (ata_piix, nvidia) when the ivtv* card interrupts come in. The disk drive (ata_piix) and network card (eth0) interrupts have only been handled by CPU0. Is "irqbalance" running on your system? For a back end system, I have to wonder what the nvidia card is doing for you, assuming it it the only device generating interrupts on IRQ16. It has genearted 9.98M interrupts in the same time of 30.3M local timer interrupts (1 nvidia card interrupt per every 3 timer interrupts). > Looks like one of the USB ports shares its IRQ with one of the cards, > but my issue happens with all three cards, so that doesn't seem to be > the likely cause of the issue. Right, especially if there are no USB devices connected to the port that IRQ19 serves. > >What is the cpu loading shown with top during video capture? Are > >there high numbers for user or io wait percentages? > Tasks: 146 total, 1 running, 145 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie > Cpu(s): 7.2%us, 4.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 88.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st > Mem: 2059632k total, 1143540k used, 916092k free, 112388k buffers > Swap: 2095100k total, 0k used, 2095100k free, 688688k cached > PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND > 2799 jpreston 20 0 214m 49m 24m S 2 2.5 36:37.44 knotify4 > 7959 jpreston 20 0 72220 12m 9.8m S 2 0.6 0:04.54 xfce4-terminal > > 1263 root 20 0 88408 51m 14m S 1 2.6 1:35.49 Xorg > 8028 jpreston 20 0 3360 504 440 S 1 0.0 0:00.35 cat > 8082 jpreston 20 0 2632 1136 848 R 1 0.1 0:00.08 top > 1345 jpreston 20 0 6464 2516 1788 S 0 0.1 0:06.88 xscreensaver > 1 root 20 0 3028 1792 1216 S 0 0.1 0:00.90 init > 2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.04 kthreadd > 3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.95 ksoftirqd/0 > 5 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:03.60 kworker/u:0 > 6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0 > 7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1 > 9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.71 ksoftirqd/1 > 11 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset > 12 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper > 13 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns > 15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.27 sync_supers > This was captured during a cat /dev/video1 > test.mpg, and the CPU > usage never went above a few percent for any process. The file was > still distorted and flawed. OK. Plenty of memory (894 MB RAM still free), plenty of CPU (88.8% idle), nothing waiting on I/O (0.0% wa). 'cat' consuming only 1% of CPU may be a little low, since the ivtv driver and cat collectively do some buffer copies in the read() call that cat makes into the ivtv driver. (May indicate not many filled video buffers being provided by the ivtv driver). Given this, the best guesses I have are: 1. an interrupt handling latency problem. 2. a PCI bus/chipset problem: DMA transfers aborting or IO transactions to registers and memory on the CX23416 chip are being aborted 3. an ivtv driver bug/race in setting up the CX23416 decoder, that causes problems in the decoder actually running 4. a cx25840 driver bug in setting up the CX25843 chip to lock on to the video signal and digitize it properly 5. an analog tuner driver bug that causes tuning to fail > Where else can I look for this? Do you have any other ideas? For #4 and #5 above, the output of several runs of 'v4l2-ctl --log-status' should let you know if the CX25843 has a good video signal. For #2 and #3, setting the debug=... option to the ivtv driver in /etc/modprobe.conf or on the modprobe ivtv command line will turn on various levels of logging in the ivtv driver (with messages emitted to /var/log/messages normally). $ modinfo ivtv [...] parm: debug:Debug level (bitmask). Default: 0 1/0x0001: warning 2/0x0002: info 4/0x0004: mailbox 8/0x0008: ioctl 16/0x0010: file 32/0x0020: dma 64/0x0040: irq 128/0x0080: decoder 256/0x0100: yuv 512/0x0200: i2c 1024/0x0400: high volume [...] So maybe, as root, # modprobe -r ivtv # modprobe ivtv debug=0x4f (or =0x44f) And then do a 'cat /dev/videoN > foo.mpg' and examine all the debug spew in /var/log/messages to see what is wrong. For #1, I'd experiment with how does video capture behave with a. having irqbalance running (or not running) b. booting into only run-level 3 (text console, no GUI/X) and unloading the nvidia driver module I would also look at IRQ handling latency with ftrace and other kernel tracing mechanisms: http://lwn.net/Articles/322666/ http://lwn.net/Articles/322731/ http://lwn.net/Articles/366796/ http://lwn.net/Articles/365835/ http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-media/msg15762.html Regards, Andy > Thank you much for your assistance so far. > Jeff > ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4772 - Release Date: 01/28/12 _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
