[mythtv-users] Spontaneous Rebooting - Need some help!

[Patrick Mansfield]

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 07:03:15PM -0700, Rob Bongiovi wrote:

> A week or so ago, I upgraded the mythtv, kernel,
> nvidia, and ivtv to the latest FC4 versions. After
> that, started having spontaneous reboots on both
> boxes. To me - that rules out a hardware component
> "breaking." like a bad HD and memory (although I ran
> memtest 86 and they passed).

> I *think* I was still running a 2.6.14 kernel before I
> upgraded and seem to be having problems with this on
> 2.6.15 and 2.6.16 kernels, so wonder if something
> changed that caused this. The other think may be that
> the newest ivtv firmware has reintroduced the IVTV/VIA
> DMA conflict. I've tried some of the recommended
> resolutions to that: have the latest bios, etc.
> 
> Thoughts on other ways to troubleshoot? Any other
> suggestions. I'm about to lose my family's support of
> MythTV.

Why not boot the old kernel and try it out? Same for other components.

FC4 won't auto remove previous kernels, though the update sites only keep
a few revisions back (i.e. I don't see any 2.6.14 FC4 kernel rpms), so if
it really was a 2.6.14 kernel and you already removed them you might have
problems.

But check your /var/cache/yum, if you haven't been cleaning it out, all
the old kernels (and rpms) will still be there.

i.e.:

	find /var/cache/yum -name 'kernel-2*'

And install (rpm -ivh) one of the older kernels etc.

You could still install and run the original FC4 kernel, even though
intermediate updates are not available. I could not install it via yum,
but you could download:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/x86_64/os/Fedora/RPMS/kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.x86_64.rpm

Or:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.i586.rpm

Of course you don't want to have that old of a kernel running with the box
on the internet.

You could also build your own kernel via kernel.org source, see if a
2.6.14 works OK or not, and then bisect from there, I haven't ever tried
git bisect. If an earlier kernel *does* work, you'd probably have to do
some sort of bisect to isolate the change, and report to FC devel.

-- Patrick Mansfield