[mythtv-users] a new type of error

[Ian Campbell]

On Thu, 2018-03-08 at 19:28 -0500, Jim Abernathy wrote:
> Mar  7 12:11:47 mythbuntu kernel: [317584.873671] NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#4 stuck for 22s! [TFWWrite:25774]

> The errors I copied were from kern.log.

Were there any kernel stack traces following them or other messages in
the vicinity? What about in the output of `sudo dmesg` (or if you are
root just `dmesg`)? Perhaps you could send the entire log for the 30s
either side of the message?

Or if necessary a photograph of the error on the console. You may want
to consider increasing the verbosity of printk to ensure you see all
the useful messages on the console -- as root run `sudo sysctl
sys.kernel/printk=9` to make it include debug messages (I think booting
with `debug` on the kernel command line does the same).

I think the kern.log is unfiltered, but maybe that depends on some
config somewhere.

These error usually messages indicate that the process in question has
been blocked uninterruptibly in the kernel for too long. The usual
cause for this IME is a driver bug (the process is interacting with
some h/w and an event or something goes astray, or the h/w is just
super slow for some reason), with hardware problems after that.

Ian.