My MythTV box randomly freezes when I am either recording a show, watching a show I already recorded, or both at the same time. I can leave the system on the menu for hours and hours no problem, but usually cannot get more than 30 minutes of tv or video watching before a crash.

I have compiled a kernel on this box as well with no crash, so I do not believe it to be a hardware problem ( such as overheating, memory, etc)

And when I say it freezes, I am talking the whoel shebang, the system becomes totally unresponsive. You cannot ssh or access the webfrontend to get it to unlock, or ctrl-alt-f1 and reboot. You cannot hit ctrl-alt-delete to get it to reboot, you have to do a hard reboot on the system.

Here is my "install doc". A fairly detailed description on how I installed my system. ( I have gotten rather proficient at reinstalling as I have done it about 8 times now due to screwing up the system severyal different ways trying to fix the problem )


Specs:

Processor: AMD Thunderbird 900MHz
Mother Board: Asus A7V
Video Card: 3dfx Voodoo Banshee
Decoder Card: WinTV-PVR-350
Sound Card: Soundblaster Live!
Network Card: Ethernet Pro 100

KnoppMyth Version: R5A12

It begins...

Downloaded KnoppMyth R5A15 - took me 23 minutes

Boot from the cd, find out that R5A15 does not support USB Keyboards for the installation.

Reboot using my KnoppMyth R5A12 CD.

Let it boot to the install menu
Selected Auto Install, set the time zone, set user settings, accepted its partitioning, began installing to harddrive.
Reboot

After it boots, enter the password, set the timezone again, let DHCP get my network settings,

Selected i686 modules
selected lirc
did not select XvMC

Leave settings alone or delete them, doesnt matter, you dont have settings yet anyway

Selected Global:
Selected next untill I got too the menu "Global backend setup":
Selected none for VBI Support
Next back to the menu

Selected Capture Cards:
Create new Card
Card type "MPEG-2 Encoder card"
Change default input to "Tuner0"
Finish, then hit escape

Selected Video Sources:
New Video Source
Video source name: "350Tuner" ( Name it whatever you want )
input data direct user information, Retrieve Lineups
Finish, hit escape

Selected Input Connections:
Select the line with Tuner0
Video Source: "350Tuner"
Finish, hit escape

Hit ecsape, let it get data direct channel and programming information

After it finishes, mythtv-frontend will start
hit CTRL-ALT-F1
login as root
wget http://dc1.snapperworld.net/files/mythtv/pvr.pl
perl pvr.pl -i
follow the prompts
nano -w /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv
changed type=2 to type=47

Now to get the remote setup:
wget http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/hauppauge/lircd.conf.hauppauge
remove everything from the file except for the section for the A415-HPG, or Silver Remote ( the 3rd section )
mv /etc/lircd.conf /etc/lircd.conf.orig
cp lircd.conf.hauppauge /etc/lircd.conf
Got a working /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc file from http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3178&highlight=model+number+gray+grey+hauppauge+remotes

reboot

Now that I have a clean install, I am going to try to get the system to crash again, so I can post the logs up here. In hopes that someone can help me with my problem.

The box crashed aprox 14:40: While recording something on tv
These are the last lines in /var/log/syslog before the crash
Apr 27 14:29:35 EmergeTV -- MARK --
Apr 27 14:38:34 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv-osd: OSD: REDO DMA took too many tries.

The box crashed again at aprox 15:00:

starting from the previos crash, similar messages to these appear in /var/log/syslog up until this crash. I have pasted the last several iterations so it doesnt get to long:

Apr 27 15:00:34 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: Checking FW at 859676 jiffies
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv-osd: OSD: REG_DECSG1LEN wait failed
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA Registers State: xfer: 0x00000000, state: 0x00000003 dec_addr: 0x09284054 enc_addr: 0x09dd0060 control: 0x00000003
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA DEC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00000000:0x00000000:0x00000000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA ENC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x0016eadc:0x09fcc000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001642dc:0x09fc0000:0x00004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001682dc:0x09fc4000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001662dc:0x09844000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00157adc:0x0a98c000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0x000efb1c:0x09a38000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0xbbcfc3ea:0xbfb8ff72:0xd9487fb5
Apr 27 15:00:35 EmergeTV kernel: 0xfdf50f60:0xb6ffe9ea:0x3bc1e3f7
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: IRQ: IVTV_IRQ_DEC_DMA_ERR intr 1
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA Registers State: xfer: 0x00000000, state: 0x00000013 dec_addr: 0x0928490c enc_addr: 0x09dd0060 control: 0x00000003
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA DEC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00000000:0x00000000:0x00000000
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA ENC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x0016eadc:0x09fcc000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001642dc:0x09fc0000:0x00004000

Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001682dc:0x09fc4000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001662dc:0x09844000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00157adc:0x0a98c000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:48 EmergeTV kernel: 0x000efb1c:0x09a38000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0xbbcfc3ea:0xbfb8ff72:0xd9487fb5
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0xfdf50f60:0xb6ffe9ea:0x3bc1e3f7
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: IRQ: IVTV_IRQ_DEC_DMA_ERR intr 2
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA Registers State: xfer: 0x00000000, state: 0x00000003 dec_addr: 0x0928490c enc_addr: 0x09dd0060 control: 0x00000003
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA DEC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00000000:0x00000000:0x00000000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: ivtv: DMA ENC Buffers:
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x0016eadc:0x09fcc000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001642dc:0x09fc0000:0x00004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001682dc:0x09fc4000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x001662dc:0x09844000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x00157adc:0x0a98c000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0x000efb1c:0x09a38000:0x80004000
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0xbbcfc3ea:0xbfb8ff72:0xd9487fb5
Apr 27 15:00:49 EmergeTV kernel: 0xfdf50f60:0xb6ffe9ea:0x3bc1e3f7


Nothing of relevance to the crash really exists in /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log

Any ideas guys?

Try a different version of IVTV. Report this to the IVTV and or MythTV mailing lists. Ensure your tuner card is on it's own IRQ. Check your BIOS...

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

This could be a hardware bug.... The A7V mobo has a VIA chipset doesn't it? Several (all?) VIA chipsets have a serious bug where the system freezes under heavy DMA load. The PVR x50 cards produce lots if DMA requests during recording. Enough to let the system freeze. Doing a cat /dev/cdrom > /dev/null usually does the trick as well (provided DMA is enabled on that drive).

Solution: Another mobo would be the obvious one. Some people claim that disabling APIC helps or disabling ACPI. Another solution is disabling the onboard IDE adapter and use a Promise one or similar. I believe there is an ivtv driver version which produces less DMA requests. Trying different ivtv versions could be a good test anyway.

I had similar issues and swapped motherboards. If you google for it you'll find plenty of references to this bug.

Ugh, I was personally hoping something had been done about this bug by now. I'm using an old shuttle ak31 board with an athlon xp 1600+ and a pvr-250 but I hadn't used knoppmyth on it for awhile since it would randomly lock-up or record 5-20 minutes of something and then stop.

How do you go about disabling apic/acpi? Bios options?
Edit: found acpi in the bios anyways.

I seem to recall some post in the last week or two on the ivtv-dev list on either via or epia problems with DMA on at least one motherboard are addressed via a recent bios upgrade. Ah here it is:

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/ ... via;#19915

-brendan