[mythtv-users] System Lock Up?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Monday 26 January 2004 00:44, apt22 at drexel.edu wrote:
> Hi-
> My system has been getting all locked up and basically freezing
> allowing me to do absolutely nothing except hit the hard power
> switch.  At first I thought it was a Myth issue, but after trying
> different things, I am not sure what is causing the problem.  Here
> are my machine specs and details of this issue, any help would be
> greatly appreciated: Athlon XP 2700/512MB/GeForce4 MX/Hauppauge 250
>     Gentoo 2.4.22-r5/IVTV 0.1.9

Your motherboard model might also help, and the version of the ivtv 
driver that you're running.

> Once upon a time I was running Myth 0.12, basically no problems, I
> bought a new HD and decided I would benefit from LVM, so I nuked
> everything.  

Do you have a board with the nForce2 chipset, by any chance?  Did you 
reinstall the same distro as before, or did you switch?

> Re-installed everything, this time Myth 0.13 b/c it was
> released and I thought I'd upgrade to keep current.  Myth 0.13 was
> giving me all sorts of problems after scouring the net and forums, I
> found a poster with similar problems and Isaac replied telling him to
> upgrade to Myth CVS to fix them.  I followed this advise, installed
> CVS and just as Isaac said, everything was working.  After 1-2 days
> running, my machine started freezing up, nothing actually crashes,
> just freezes and doesn't respond to anything(keystrokes, SSH
> terminal, etc).  Logs report nothing interesting.  One thing I've
> noticed is that the CAPS LOCK and SCROLL LOCK lights on my keyboard
> flash repeatedly forever until I power the box down.

Sounds like a kernel panic.  This is *not* caused by Myth (though it's 
possible its related to the ivtv driver.

> So, I figured
> it was probably a CVS bug or something, I uninstalled all Myth
> components(including nuking database) and switched back to Myth
> 0.12(which previously I had no problems with).  After running this
> version for a day and a half, the same thing started to occur.
>
> So, basically, my question is whether anyone else has seen this kind
> of thing and if anyone had a guess at what was causing this and how I
> might go about further trouble-shooting/fixing?

This could be any number of things... CPU overheating, bad memory, bad 
driver, flaky hardware...

Search the list archives for "kernel panic" and see what some past 
recommendations have been for diagnosing it.

-JAC