[mythtv-users] Occasional hard freezes

[Julian Edwards]

Ryan Steffes wrote:

> I thought I had finally gotten this fixed with the kernel option 
> nolapic, but it happened to me again.  I am experiencing hard lock ups 
> that seem to be related to high data throughput, but aren't consistent 
> enough for me to track down.  When it freezes, only hitting the reset 
> or power button fixes it.
>
> I have an MSI K7N2 Delta 2 motherboard with an AMD Barton 2500+ in 
> it.  It has a nforce northbridge.  I am passing the kernel "acpi=no 
> noapic nolapic". I'm running 2.6.11-6mdk.  I have one PVR 150.  I have 
> two hard drives, running LVM to make one video share.  I'm running 
> ivtv 0.3.9
>  
> What happens is a hard lock up. It generally happens when I'm 
> exercising the ethernet hard.  

This exact same thing was happening to me too with my KT6 Delta.

[snip]

> Can anyone give any advice on where to go from here?

Sure.  The problem is almost certainly to do with interrupt sharing.  In 
my case it was a problem with the ACPI steering assigning too many 
devices the same IRQ.  I ended up fixing it by disabling unnecessary 
onboard hardware (eg I don't need 8 USB controllers or onboard sound), 
using acpi=off (is that different to your acpi=no ?) and re-positioning 
the cards in the PCI slots.  I would check your motherboard's manual 
since some slots will share an interrupt whatever you do.  You can also 
assign specific slots a specific IRQ in the BIOS.

I've also heard that using SBLive cards can cause these sorts of issues 
- and that's exactly what I am using.  If I remove it and turn on ACPI 
again it all works with no problems, but I need its SPDIF out.  Ho hum.

Good luck.
J