[mythtv] Backend hang after ivtv error

[John Freer]

I've been having a fairly similar problem.  Hauppauge PVR-250 and a
Win-TV dbx, and also an HD-2000.

Whenever the bttv card is recording, there's a 1 in 4 chance that the
computer will hard lock and require me pushing the reset button.

For me this means a hang about every two weeks.

I see something in the logs befor the hang about IRQ problems and
some OCERR lines.  Nothing smoking.

This problem has been with me since FC2 and through a couple of
kernels.  I was hoping the recent atrpms update to bttv would fix the
problem, but I can't prove that out since the July version of bttv
and v4l breaks PVR-250 tuning for me.

Good luck.
JF


--- Petersen Curt <petersen.curt at gmail.com> wrote:

> For users & devs:
> I'm using two cards in my system: A hauppauge PVR-500 and a
> hauppauge
> bt878-based card.
> Has anyone had any problems with:
> 
> 1) ivtv giving a DMA error in the log, and then
> 2) mythbackend fails to record using that tuner until restarted,
> and
> 3) frontends/web stop responding and repeatedly logs "waiting for
> thread" forever.
> Everything works 90% of the time.  This error just comes up
> occasionally - more often when I'm recording 2-3 shows at once.
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions to improve stability?  What encoder
> firmware are people having luck with out there?  I'm using
> 0x02040011
> and ivtv-0.3.7a.
> 
> For the devs:
> I've tracked it down to a pthread_join() statement in tv_rec.cpp. 
> It
> appears that when the scheduler things the recording has finished,
> the
> backend gets stuck waiting forever for the "encoder" thread to
> complete, which is started with pthread_create() in the
> "SpawnEncoder"
> function (or something like that....near the top of the same file).
> 
> So I know it's an ivtv error and trust me, I'm working on trying to
> fix that as fast as I can.  But for now, would it be possible for
> mythbackend to recover from it?  Perhaps replace the pthread_join()
> with a non-blocking call and timeout after waiting a few seconds? 
> Or
> perhaps the encoder thread can exit prematurely if it doesn't get a
> buffer from the ivtv module for awhile?
> 
> Also, I just checked out the source from the subversion "fixes"
> branch
> last night and installed it today.  Should I expect any better
> behavior from that?  Or should I just roll with the 0.18.1 release?
> 
> I'm not using DVB.....just a PVR-500 and bt878 card.
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