I recently upgraded the hardware in my frontend. I haven't been able to fully diagnose the problem, but it seems that when I am watching a recorded show or live tv that it works fine the first 2-3 times and then the next time the box locks up. I get a black screen and I cannot switch to console or remote into the machine. Not only that, but if I was trying to watch tv the backend says the tuner is still being used for that even after I hard reboot the frontend. I have checked every log I can think of, and I am not seeing an error around the time this happens. This is with a new motherboard, cpu, and video card. I turned off APIC in the bios because I have seen that APIC can cause problems, but that didn't seem to do anything.

Any suggestions on where I can look to at least get some sort of error message? The really annoying things is that if this happens while I'm watching tv I have to restart the backend to get the tuner back (or is there an easier way to force a release of a tuner?)

On the syslog of my backend I am getting this error everytime I launch "Watch TV" on my frontend, could this be my issue?:

You can see here on my backend that I watch and then exit live tv 3 times. Then, on the fourth try it locks up:



I have gone through all of the logs on the frontend, and nothing happens at 15:20. Most of the event timestamps go from 15:13 to 15:26(when I forced a hard reset). This is crazy, I don't know how to go about figuring this one out.

{Multi-post when site was crashing...}

{Multi-post when site was crashing...}

{Multi-post when site was crashing...}

I have been having similar problems and I have started to wonder if this is an irq problem. I use an asus p4p800e motherboard and spent some time fiddling with my irq assignments in the bios. I changed to pnp bios and disabled some unused services on my motherboard firewire, floppy, parallel port etc. this seems to have helped but my problems haven't gone away entirely. According to lspci -v I currently I have:

NVIDIA card IRQ 18
PVR250 IRQ 22
PVR350 IRQ 18
PCHDTV 3000 IRQ 22

Previously, the PVR350 was also on IRQ 22. I'd like to get them all on completely separate interrupts but I don't know how.

_________________
BE: R8.4, HVR2250, MCE media center remote, GigaByte GA-EP43-UD3L, 2gb ram

FE: Linhes 8.4, Mythbuntu, Linux Mint DE

Wow, I did the same thing. It looks like I have a lot of conflicts.
Does anyone know how to change this?

Hey rsay, run this command:
cat /proc/interrupts

This is what I get:



From what I've seen, this doesn't indicate and IRQ conflict. If there was a conflict there would be multiple lines with the same IRQ.

kmkittre, what are you using for tuner cards?

I have two mythtv boxes currently - one is being built as a replacement for the other.

My old box, with one aging (about 8 years old) hauppauge wintv card, does not exhibit this problem.

My new box (I'm going small form factor) has a PVR 500 as it's main tuner card (I've also moved the pcHDTV5500 to this box). It DOES have this problem. It is intermittent however, and that's making it a real PITA to diagnose.

When I first encountered this problem I could not find any reference to it anywhere on the forums. The only piece of hardware which was completely new in my new box was the pvr500... and since it is a widely used card I expected someone to have noticed if there were any problems.

I suspected the card was defective and had it RMA'd but the new card does exactly the same thing.

Only in the past few days have posts like this started. Honestly I'm relived it's not just me, but curious as to why the problem is not affecting more people.

In my case, it all seems to be decided at shutdown or boot. Sometimes the box will come up properly and everything will run fine for as long as the box is on. When I power cycle it this problem crops up.

To top it off, I'm getting intermittent database corruptions when I hard-reset the box.

After fighting with this for the whole month (re-installing from scratch dozens of times to make sure I didn't miss anything in the install,) I have wizened up and created a backup image of what for all intents and purposes is a "safe point" - everything is working. It takes me about 5 minutes to load this image, and everything runs fine until I reboot again.

Obviously this is not a good long term solution. If you get any headway on this please share your findings as my brain hurts. If anyone wants to help but needs more info, just let me know and I will happily provide it!

_________________
-Mike
* Currently using 5E50, started with 5A16
* Soltek 75FRN2 with Athlon 2500, 1GB RAM
* Hauppauge WinTV PCI
* pcHDTV 5500

I did a fresh install after getting that new card yesterday... I haven't had this problem resurface yet. (Though now I'm getting the problem with backend not starting up - using thornsoft's babysit_backend.sh cronjob script as a work around for it though.)

I'll keep you posted if this lock-up problem re-occurs. I haven't had the database corrupt on me yet either - I think it was due to the hard-reset I had to do after the lock-ups.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

_________________
-Mike
* Currently using 5E50, started with 5A16
* Soltek 75FRN2 with Athlon 2500, 1GB RAM
* Hauppauge WinTV PCI
* pcHDTV 5500

Here is the result from my cat /proc/interrupts:

CPU0 CPU1
0: 143820014 0 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 12 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042
6: 5 0 IO-APIC-edge floppy
7: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge parport0
8: 1 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc
9: 1 0 IO-APIC-level acpi
12: 107 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042
15: 6792304 0 IO-APIC-edge ide1
16: 26976 0 IO-APIC-level skge
17: 1287204 0 IO-APIC-level libata, uhci_hcd:usb3
18: 43175536 0 IO-APIC-level libata, ehci_hcd:usb5, ivtv1
19: 17121355 0 IO-APIC-level uhci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb4, nvidia
20: 0 0 IO-APIC-level uhci_hcd:usb2
21: 2 0 IO-APIC-level ohci1394
22: 3750896 0 IO-APIC-level Intel ICH5
23: 3152199 0 IO-APIC-level cx88[0], cx88[0], ivtv0
NMI: 0 0
LOC: 143820841 143819653
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

_________________
BE: R8.4, HVR2250, MCE media center remote, GigaByte GA-EP43-UD3L, 2gb ram

FE: Linhes 8.4, Mythbuntu, Linux Mint DE

So, I diagnosed my problem to only occurring when I had a video card plugged in. I couldn't really find a way around this, so I replaced the motherboard...

Which motherboard did you pick? I'm thinking of changing mine also.

_________________
BE: R8.4, HVR2250, MCE media center remote, GigaByte GA-EP43-UD3L, 2gb ram

FE: Linhes 8.4, Mythbuntu, Linux Mint DE

I ended up going with an AMD 3800+ X2 (socket AM2) and the Asus M2NPV-VM. I then also had to buy new memory. I got all three from Newegg for about $250. Runs HD like a champ.