[mythtv-users] Suddenly flaky firewire

Christopher Meredith chmeredith at gmail.com
Sat Feb 5 01:25:17 UTC 2011


On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> On Feb 4, 2011, at 4:03 PM, Phil Linttell wrote:
>
>>> Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2011 11:54:38 -0600
>>> From: Christopher Meredith <chmeredith at gmail.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Suddenly flaky firewire
>>>>>>> I have been using firewire as an alternate tuner for clear QAM
>>>>>>> stations accessible via my cablebox, and as a channel changer for the
>>>>>>> same cable box and an HD-PVR. It worked fine until I updated Ubuntu to
>>>>>>> Maverick (10.10). Now, the firewire system seems to be really
>>>>>>> unstable. It keeps "collapsing" during recordings. When that happens,
>>> Thanks for the reply. The upgrade was actually a jump from Mythbuntu
>>> 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.10 via the distribution upgrade tool. According to
>>> uname, my current kernel is:
>>>
>>> I can confirm that I am using the new juju firewire stack. Maybe the
>>> best option for me at this point is to try switching back to the old
>>> one. Any other thoughts?
>>
>> You have a case of bad ju-ju.
>>
>> I ran into the same upgrading to 10.10.   I use firewire just for
>> channel-changing, but intermittently the firewire bus would just lock
>> up....  only pulling the cable and re-inserting it, or powering off and
>> on, would fix it.  (unloading/reloading the modules wouldn't clear it.)
>>
>> You have a choice of blacklisting juju and going back to the old stack,
>> or changing your firewire card.
>
> Or using newer firewire drivers, there's been quite a bit of excellent
> work done lately on the firewire drivers, post-2.6.35, all of which has
> the potential to be relevant to your situation.
>
>
>> In my case, I was using a cheap PCI firewire card.  I upgraded my
>> motherboard, and have been using the firewire port on the motherboard
>> with no issues.
>
> Generally, JMicron chipsets are... well, cheap crap. Of course, so are
> VIA, ALi and some others, and TI has put out a few duds as well... And
> the latest Agere/LSI chipset goes boom with MSI enabled...
>
> But anyway, much of the work I mentioned was to solidify the firewire
> driver stack, particularly in cases where chipsets might do odd things
> that aren't necessary spec-compliant or expected...

I'll admit it happily. The card I'm using is a 2-port PCI-E card I got
because the PCI-E was the only spare slot I had. I believe I got the
card new in box for about $7 on Amazon. I'll try regressing to the
legacy firewire stack and if that doesn't work, check out the newer
kernels with newer drivers. Thanks all for the advice.


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