[mythtv-users]WAF question: dealing with crashes

[Kevin Kuphal]

Ryan Steffes wrote:

>And how does any of that help if Myth is crashing the system?  Before
>you point down to the bottom of the answer and spout the "It can't",
>I'll clarify.  What I'm really asking is what are the proper steps for
>diagnosing a problem that's brought about by myth that presents as a
>system lockup?  It could be the driver, it could be a kernel issue
>like the apic thing, whatever.  All I know is that on two seperate
>machines now I've had problems with what seems to be mythtranscode
>causing the machine to hard lock, and I have no idea how to isolate it
>down, other than turning off autotranscode seems to stop the problem.
>  
>
It falls outside the realm of Myth to diagnose your hardware or driver 
problems in their documentation.  Given the sheer number of options for 
kernels, drivers, hardware, etc., it would be futile to try to capture 
steps for any or all of them to diagnose.  You should instead refer to 
help for your distribution, your hardware and their drivers.  I had a 
problem with a kernel oops during recordings that was never Myth's fault 
but, of course, was only visible from Myth since it was the only part of 
my system that interacted with this hardware.  I narrowed it down to 
only occuring when recording from my TBS channel 99 which as horrible 
reception here and I concluded that the BTTV drivers were freaking out 
when trying to tune my hardware to that station so I just don't record 
from it if I can avoid it.

>Many users, maybe incorrectly, also refer to that situation as "Myth
>crashing" and pointing to that doc doesn't help.  That section of the
>docs could stand to be expanded.  It would help if someone would
>volunteer to adapt the init scripts to have a gdb flag and
>automatically capture the backtrace if it can be done.  Advice should
>be added on how to isolate what's causing hard locks besides just
>sayign Myth isn't doing it.  It may not be doing it directly, but
>obviously it presents situations where the hardlocks are more likely.
>  
>
I'm sure the developers would be happy to consider a modification to the 
HOW-TO section to include information about what to do with hard locks 
or kernel oops by directing  them to their hardware support forums or 
distribution support channels.

Kevin