[mythtv-users] backend crashes
junk
junk at giantblob.com
Wed Jan 31 22:03:27 UTC 2007
Hi,
My backend seems to be going through periods where it repeatedly dies
and I'm not sure how to determine the cause of it. Sometimes it'll run
fine for a day or two and I can make a number of scheduled recordings
and/or watch live-tv, other times it'll die on me without warning,
sometimes several times an hour. I don't get much indication in the log
beyond seeing 'Starting up as the master server.' as it restarts after
(presumably) crashing.
Firstly, is there any way to force it print a backtrace when it dies?
It's running as a service started by init - does anyone know how to edit
the Gentoo /etc/init.d/mythbackend script to start it under gdb safely
and generate a backtrace on a fatal signal without requiring any user
input (so when it suddently dies at 3AM, I don't need to be there to
watch it!)
Secondly, can anyone hazard a guess at possible causes?
Things that might be relevant:
- I'm running a single tuner dvb setup on a vanilla 2.6.19.2 kernel
- my dvb reception is poor but backend crashes don't seem particularly
correlated with periods of particularly poor reception/bursts of errors
in the received MPEG2 stream - sometimes I can record hours of
programming with masses of reported errors in the stream and visible
glitches, other times the back end will die repeatedly with no reported
errors in received stream.
- I've tried messing with PCI latencies, but put them back to defaults
when it didn't seem to help
- I have mythcommflag running sometimes, I suspect it might be
contributing to the problem - is this possible?
- All my filesystems are XFS, so autoexpire delete storm is not a
likely cause?
- Machine has loads of memory (2GB) and 1.8GHz A64 CPU (in 32bit mode)
- I doubt it's overloaded recording one dvb stream
- Single ATA disk has bus to itself and DMA is definitely enabled
- CPU, northbridge, memory and disk are all cool and I don't believe
the hardware is flakey (it's previously been running quite heavy Linux
loads without any odd behavior before being repurposed as my MythTV box)
Any suggestions gratefully received, thanks
-- jeek
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