[mythtv-users] Dealing with frequent crashes
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl at jorgensen.org.uk
Thu May 10 08:47:30 UTC 2007
On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 06:57:35PM -0700, David wrote:
> MythTV has been crashing on me pretty frequently. How do I diagnose
> the cause of the crash? The computer will completely freeze up. None
> of the usual steps (ctrl + alt + backspace or ctrl + alt + f1) work.
> I have to actually pull the power on the computer, which is probably
> not such a great idea.
Hard crashes like this point towards something very low-level going
wrong.
Likely suspects:
- Hardware problems. Things like an overheating CPU, faulty memory or
struggling power supply have been known to cause this.
- Video driver problems: I've seen this personally with the ATI fglrx
drivers, and I suspect that the proprietary Nvidia drivers have the
same capability.
Is there any pattern to *when* the crashes happen?, e.g.:
- After the machine has been running for about xx minutes? (suspect
overheating)
- While watching TV? (suspect video drivers)
- While watching recordings? Especially when fast-forwarding/rewinding?
(suspect video drivers)
- While a screen saver is running? (suspect glx)
- While listening to music with visualisations running? (suspect glx
again)
It really helps if you can deliberately provoke a crash - random crashes
are a PITA to track down :-(
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl at jorgensen.org.uk http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl at jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A: A canary with the super-user password.
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