[mythtv-users] Frontend locking up and unable to kill it.

[Allen Edwards]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 9:27 AM Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz>
wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Jul 2019 08:01:48 -0700, you wrote:
>
> >> Here is what I did:
> >top (to find the PID)
> >sudo kill 1555
> >top (still running)
> >sudo kill 1555
> >top (still running)
> >sudo kill -9 1555
> >ps aux | grep mythfrontend (still running)
> >sudo killall  mythfrontend.re
> >ps aux | grep mythfrontend (still running)
> >I believe it was at this point I went downstairs and found the popup
> asking
> >if I really wanted to kill the program but with no cursor I was unable to
> >randomly land on the "Yes" area and it did not respond to a "Y" from the
> >keyboard. The UI was still interactive and I did a right click on the
> >mythfrontend tack on the taskbar and said close. The computer was still
> >acting normally at this time except no cursor. I then went back upstairs
> to
> >my remote session.
> >sudo shutdown now -r
> >Then I went downstairs to the computer and pressed the power button, which
> >normally does a graceful shutdown. Nothing happened so then I held the
> >power button down and the computer turned off.
> >
> >So as you can see, I did kill PID twice.
>
> OK, so it is not the double kill problem.
>
> If you need to find the cursor, you can do Ctrl-Alt-T to open a
> terminal window and the cursor will show up when it is over that
> window.  So you move the window until it is lined up above the thing
> you want to click, and then move the cursor straight down off that
> window until you think you are in the right place and click.  With
> only one degree of freedom, it usually does not take too many tries to
> hit the right location.
>
> Another thing worth trying is to shut down and restart X - if
> mythfrontend is locked up waiting for something in X, that should
> unlock it.  If you are running lightdm as the display manager, then
> you can do that with:
>
> sudo systemctl restart lightdm
>
> I do not know if that works with gdm, as I have had to switch to
> lightdm on my 18.04 systems in order to get around a gdm problem that
> makes x11vnc not work.  It is easy to switch from gdm to lightdm -
> just install the lightdm package and reboot.
>
> It is also a good idea to have a terminal window open in the
> background anyway, as with some of the mythfrontend problems, it does
> a broadcast crash message (usually an "Assert failed" message) that
> gets displayed on all open terminals.
>
> >I was under the impression that Ubuntu 18.04 would break my LIRC code and
> >become another project to get the system working again. I ran Mythbuntu
> >8.04 until just this year and never had the problems I have had with the
> >latest install. I thought I had it all fixed but then these two lock ups
> >happened. Very frustrating.
>
> Yes, the latest mythfrontend does have a couple of ways of crashing.
> But I have not seen it lock up as you are getting.  It also has lots
> of nice new things too, and more coming.
>
> It was the change to kernel drivers and devinput in 14.04? 16.04? that
> really broke LIRC setups, but you will have already met that.  So yes,
> the LIRC code as installed by the 18.04 package is badly broken, but
> you just need to run this script from my web server to fix that:
>
> http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-18.04-install.sh
>
> I spent a fair few hours working out how to fix LIRC, but now that I
> have, it works properly as normal and you should not need much effort
> to get it going.  You just need to run the lirc-setup program and
> adjust a couple of names in your LIRC config files and it should all
> work, if you have a remote such as an MCE or Hauppauge that uses the
> devinput driver.
>
> I do not think you have said what version of MythTV you are running -
> is it v30+fixes?
>
> >Allen
> _______________________________________________
>

MythTV froze again this morning and I will try to clarify the behavior and
then ask for some specific help.

As suggested I had left a terminal window open and there were no messages
but the cursor was working. I tried closing myth using the close click
selection on the dropdown in the GUI. At that point I got the dialog about
do I really want to close the non responsive program. I moved the terminal
over as suggested and was able to use the mouse to close Myth.  I restarted
it without problems.  My wife started the show clicking on resume from
bookmark and it went to the same point in the program and froze again. This
time I tried the CTRL-ALT-BS and everything on the GUI closed down but
nothing restarted as it normally does. Upstairs to open a remote session
and did a shdo shutdown now -r.  About 5 minutes later the computer finally
restarted and things worked fine.  We even played through the scene that
froze without incident. It is possible that the CTRL-ALT-BS would have
worked if I had waited 5 minutes but I did not.

I am going to assume that the GUI is hanging up and causing the 5 minute
delay on shutdown.  I am also going to assume that is why CTRL-ALT-BS did
not work. An acceptable solution for my use of Myth would be to have
CTRL-ALT-BS close a frozen myth without a 5 minute delay. When I was
running Mythbuntu 8.04 we occasionally had myth freeze and used CTRL-ALT-BS
to resume and that was fine. Can anyone tell me how to make Myth close
without hanging the system for 5 minutes?

PS.  I did fsck as suggested a few days ago and there were no errors.


Allen
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