[mythtv-users] Playback hung

[Will Dormann]

On 3/18/14, 10:52 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> However this:
> 
>>> Mar 16 19:45:03 ThinkCentre-M58p kernel: [1648447.398228] Process
>>> irqbalance (pid: 1080, threadinfo ffff880079474000, task
>>> ffff8800363bae00) 
> 
> seems to indicate it's something related to hardware device access
> (possibly even BIOS-level/ACPI type stuff)--though I'll be the first to
> admit I'm not a kernel/low-level-system guru.  It may be a bug in
> irqbalance, or it may just be your system/firmware does things in a way
> that gave irqbalance problems.  (Oh, and FWIW, during playback of video,
> you'll have lots of IRQ's in play, so you may just be stressing
> irqbalance more than any typical tester.)


Ahh, good catch!  I had overlooked the process that was involved.  I'm
less confident that it's hard drive related now.  It may be worth making
sure that the BIOS is the latest version.  And even with systems that
don't have BIOS updates, you may be able to update the CPU microcode
with the microcode.ctl package.

e.g. when I boot, I get:
[    9.103257] microcode: CPU0 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x8, revision=0x20d
[    9.691868] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x8, revision=0x20d
[    9.697337] microcode: CPU2 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x8, revision=0x20d
[    9.702535] microcode: CPU3 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x8, revision=0x20d
[    9.708080] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00
<tigran at aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba


I think we can probably all agree that the problem you are experiencing
is pretty low-level.   It's just that when you get into low-level
instability with a system it can be hard to nail down to a specific
cause.  It usually ends up being a process of elimination.



-WD