[mythtv-users] Firmware not found?!

Larry Finger Larry.Finger at lwfinger.net
Mon Dec 16 16:59:09 UTC 2013


On 12/16/2013 10:07 AM, Rich West wrote:
> This isn't entirely a mythtv question, so I apologize in advanced.  It
> is with regard to my mythtv system as a whole, and since others may have
> a similar setup and gone down the same rabbit hole to reach their own
> solution, I thought it was worth asking here (google only has me
> tumbling down the hole further).
>
> I forced myself to go down the route of upgrading the backend and all
> frontends to Fedora 19 and MythTV 0.27 (I was at 0.25).  Everything went
> smoothly, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the newer features
> on the frontend.  My backend is somewhat older, but it does the job.. 3
> PVR-150's, a dual-core AMD X2 4000+, 2GB ram, dedicated OS drive and two
> 500GB TV stores (movies are on another machine served out from NFS).
>
> After my last fiasco with going to Fedora 18 (then backing down to
> Fedora 17 and the 3.3.4 kernel), I made the jump figuring that the
> driver issues had to have been cleared up by now.  Unfortunately, I was
> wrong.  The VIA drivers (that's the chipset on this motherboard) are
> terribly broken in anything greater than 3.3.4.  Under 3.3.4, the system
> runs fine.  Under anything greater, the system will run fine anywhere
> from 10 minutes to 3 hours before it exhibits drive failures, network
> failures, or both.
>
> Anyhow, that's a kernel issue.. so I rolled back to the Fedora 17 kernel
> 3.3.4-5 and life was good again.  However, now it isn't finding the
> firmware for my PVR-150's!
>
> [   81.795911] ivtv0: Unable to open firmware v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (must
> be 376836 bytes)
> [   81.796828] ivtv0: Did you put the firmware in the hotplug firmware
> directory?
> [   81.797875] ivtv0: Retry loading firmware
> ...
> This happens for each card.
>
> And the files are there: ls -l /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-*
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 262144 May 26  2006 /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-dec.fw
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 376836 Feb 17  2007 /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 155648 May 26  2006
> /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-init.mpg
>
> Now, /lib is a symbolic link to /usr/lib with the newer layout (Fedora18
> and above?), so I'm not sure if that is freaking it out.  I'd just like
> to get this back in to working order so as to restore TV services while
> looking in to what the nextgen build should be.

The layout should not matter as long as there is a path to /lib/firmware/ and 
the required files are there.

I am not using a PVR-150, but I have a PVR-250 and a PVR-500. The md5sums for 
the firmware files are

finger at desktop:~> md5sum /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x*
305dba74bbe5905447add8883f3ecb68  /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-dec.fw
9b39b3d3bba1ce2da40f82ef0c50ef48  /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw
0661f8b2693fe3123e6234557353eacc  /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-init.mpg

If the files were messed up, I would expect a different message, but you never know.

When you were running F19's native kernel, was the firmware being loaded? The 
reason I ask is that there was a period when synchronous firmware loading would 
fail because the load process timed out because the necessary user space code 
had not yet started. It is possible that the 3.3.4 kernel fails this way. You 
could check this by blacklisting cx2341x in /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf, 
and then manually loading it with a 'sudo modprobe -v cx2341x' once the system 
is running.

Larry




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