[mythtv-users] PVR-350 (hard) lockups, Fixed!

Maverick mavantix at gmail.com
Fri Mar 11 20:50:02 UTC 2005


OK, since there seems to be a ton of people on the list lately
complaining about the lockup issues with PVR-350's, using TVout, I
figured I'd do a little writeup on how we fixed it, and the things we
tried before "fixing" it.

About a month ago, a friend of mine and I both bought PVR-350's, and
put them in "junk" computers I had lying around. One computer was a
Dell GX110 (P3-667, 256MB, Intel Chipset), the other being a generic
Celeron 533, 256MB, VIA Chipset (not sure which model/version chipset,
probably KT133).

Now, by hard lockup, this is what happened for us, FF or REW a bunch,
Watch TV for awhile, or view the Recorded shows with the mini preview,
the system would just freeze. Having to reboot w/ the reset switch. If
we did it quick enough, we can bring the machines back to life by
causing the NIC (or maybe other PCI device?) to interrupt. So ping
flooding the NIC, or hitting enter at the SSH prompt on the box worked
magic.

As far as I'm concerned, ivtv-fb, the IVTV Frame Buffer (aka ivtv-osd
in dmesg) has a dma/irq problem on older or faulty hardware. I'm not
sure if it gets suck in a loop, or some sort of event wait condition,
who knows. What I do know is, it works fine on "different" hardware,
yes, that was our fix!

My friend upgraded from the 533/VIA board to Compaq ATX board I had
laying around, it is a Athlon 600. He has since had no problems.

I decided to buy a new board, because my Dell P3 system worked without
lockups long enough to impress me on how great MythTV is. I bought a
Silverstone LC11, Chaintech Summit 7NIF2, Athlon XP 2700, 512MB DDR
400?, SAMSUNG SP1614N 8MB 160GB HD (SUPER QUIET!!), and absolutely
love it! It works fine, no PVR-350 lockups. I'm still using the
PVR-350's TVout, but I bought the board based on Jarod's use of it in
his "Standard Definition Slave Backend and Playback System", and I
intend on using the onboard nVidia TVout at some point. (BTW, thanks
for the recommendation Jarod!)

We also installed KnoppMyth R5A12 on both.

So, two fixed boxes, both got different hardware, but one was still an
old POS. I'm guessing that Compaq board just doesn't have the problems
the other two boards we where using did.

Now, the list of stuff we tried that didn't work:

* Upgrade R4V5 to Kernel 2.6.10 from debs (lot of work, no effect,
other than Tuner type 47 was now recognized properly)

* Disable APCI (noapci in boot loader), no effect.

* Disable Power Management in BIOS, no effect.

* Try almost every ivtv version at the time, 0.2.x and 0.3.x, no effect.

* Use another IDE controller instead of the onboard one. This fixed
the lockup problem on my Dell P3, but the controller sharing the PCI
bus with the PVR-350 made the system unwatchable (frame rate wise)

* Disable DMA on the HD I/O. It has the effect of slowing the box to a
crawl, beyond that, didn't "fix" the problem, because the box itself
was too slow...

* Force different tuner types in ivtv, no effect except lack of signal, etc.

* Remove non-essential PCI devices, disable anything that could
interrupt on the bus. Un fortunately, didn't really have much effect.

* Rearrange IRQ's in the BIOS, this might be the one hope some systems
have. It seems some of these older systems won't hard lock if the
PVR-350 is NOT sharing an IRQ with another system device. My Dell P3
insisted on forcing the onboard video and the PVR-350 to share an IRQ,
if you changed one, it changed the other. Interestingly enough, it
worked fine prior to a BIOS upgrade, so maybe the BIOS upgrade was
what forced them to share... If your can put your PVR-350 on it's own
IRQ, it may help. lspci -v will show you what devices are on what
IRQ's.

* Run X Windows on a monitor, and use Myth's PVR-350 TVout checkbox,
so just TV is on the TV. This fixes the problem, probably because
ivtv-fb is no longer used for X, but it's annoying to have a little
monitor next to your 65" TV... :)

I spent about $650 for my hardware (newegg.com + pcalchemy.com), and
my friend used stuff I had laying around, just bought the 350.

I took a bunch of pictures of the Silverstone LC11 install, if anyone
is interested, let me know. I might put up a page with install
notes... It's a wonderful case, and I'd recommend to anyone wanting a
quiet, modern, non-computer looking device in their home theater.

Hope this helps someone,
-Kenneth


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