[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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