[mythtv-users] oom-killer on the loose.

[Nick Rout]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Richard Thomas <rich at dicksonlife.com> wrote:
> I'm a relatively new user of Myth, having it running for a week or two
> now. I'm having an issue where every 2-3 days, the system will hang.
> Looking through the logs, oom-killer has sprung into actions and started
> killing things off. I'm not sure how to track down what is causing the
> issue. Many processes are killed off by oom-killer so it doesn't appear
> to be one specific process. I'm running 2GB physical and 2GB swap which
> I would think would be plenty (Though I'm not against assigning more if
> appropriate).
>
> I'm using the latest version of Knoppmyth, on and AMD 2-core Brisbane CPU.
>
> Just now, I managed to catch the system after oom-killer had sprung into
> action but before the system was wiped out. Everything looked ok in free
> and top and memory was not tight. I rebooted as I am at work, away from
> home and have no way to reboot once it hangs.
>
>  From the logs, it looks like it may be related to being on the
> half/whole hour. No program was recording at the time, nor had one just
> finished recording (The Myth commercial thing has been mentioned as
> using a lot of memory in another thread). Myth was in the menus and not
> showing live TV.
>
> I have a fair bit of Linux experience and am pretty technically
> competent. I'm willing to put some effort in to fixing this but have not
> really had any run-ins with oom-killer before so would appreciate any
> pointers. Technical details follow:
>
> Swap is on and correctly configured:
>
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:       1942812     599208    1343604          0      36352     165260
> -/+ buffers/cache:     397596    1545216
> Swap:      1959920          0    1959920
>
> Here is the first occurence of oom-killer today
>
> Jan 12 14:32:39 mythtv kernel: cx88[0] dvb invoked oom-killer:
> gfp_mask=0xd0, order=0, oomkilladj=0

Looks like a driver bug (ref: dvb). What dvb card are you runnning
with what kernel/driver combination? (not that I'll be able to help
much more but someone may)

knoppmyth forum may help too, they spin their own kernel and drivers IIRC.