[mythtv-users]WAF question: dealing with crashes

[Ryan Steffes]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 01:07:45 -0700, Jarod Wilson <jcw at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 21 October 2004 01:03, Lachlan McIntosh wrote:
> 
> 
> > >It _is_ however, 'par for the course' for people to bitch about a
> > >problem and not provide any useful information to help in debugging it.
> >
> > So is there a procedure so I can find out what has happened when Myth
> > Crashes and report it?
> >
> > I've had 5-6 crashes per week since I installed MythTv (not bitching
> > yet...)
> > But my Linux experience is limited
> >
> > (read: I'm a windows expert and I only installed Linux so I can run
> > Myth)
> >
> > When a crash has occurred, I've looked through the log files
> > (in /var/log, is this where I should look???) but I've not really every
> > come
> > across information that looks useful when Myth Frontend or Myth Backend
> > abends.....
> >
> > When the front end crashes it usually just dumps me out to X and it's
> > either F1-R or
> > Reboot to get it all back.
> >
> > I'm a professional software developer so I would be more than happy to
> > report the reason
> > For crashes -- if I know how to do so in a useful manner....
> 
> http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-20.html#ss20.2
> 
> --


And how does any of that help if Myth is crashing the system?  Before
you point down to the bottom of the answer and spout the "It can't",
I'll clarify.  What I'm really asking is what are the proper steps for
diagnosing a problem that's brought about by myth that presents as a
system lockup?  It could be the driver, it could be a kernel issue
like the apic thing, whatever.  All I know is that on two seperate
machines now I've had problems with what seems to be mythtranscode
causing the machine to hard lock, and I have no idea how to isolate it
down, other than turning off autotranscode seems to stop the problem.

Many users, maybe incorrectly, also refer to that situation as "Myth
crashing" and pointing to that doc doesn't help.  That section of the
docs could stand to be expanded.  It would help if someone would
volunteer to adapt the init scripts to have a gdb flag and
automatically capture the backtrace if it can be done.  Advice should
be added on how to isolate what's causing hard locks besides just
sayign Myth isn't doing it.  It may not be doing it directly, but
obviously it presents situations where the hardlocks are more likely.