[mythtv-users] mythbackend Start-up issue - possible race with dvb device firmware loading

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Wed Nov 18 12:21:38 UTC 2020


On Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:45:20 +0000, you wrote:

>I'm more puzzled by the fact that the firmware load doesn't seem to be happening early enough in the 
>startup sequence.
>
>On my plain Debian system, the firmware is loaded as a consequence of the tuner being detected by 
>udev and long before any user program starts up.
>
>If what the OP is experiencing is indeed to do with the tuner, I would suspect that the tuner is 
>reaching end of life. My 290e died under similar circumstances. In the end I got fed up with the 
>tangle of USB and UHF cables behind my server and replaced the lot with a HDHR duo.

Firmware loading depends entirely on the drivers - each driver that
needs to load firmware does that itself, rather than the system
providing a service to do it.  So each driver author makes different
decisions about how and when they will do it.  It is often done only
on the first real use of a tuner - just getting its status is not
enough.  So it often happens when mythbackend does its testing of
tuners when it starts up.

Your experience of having the firmware load when udev touches the
tuner is very unusual - I have never met a tuner that does that.  I
suspect that the problem is that the tuner drivers are loaded well
before the filesystems are up and running, so they have to wait for
some signal that it is now OK to read a file with their firmware in
it.  So they just wait for first use of the tuner, there being no easy
way for a driver to detect that the filesystems are up.


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