Pluto sistematically crashes on certain conditions

[archived]

Hi all

I'm facing a very annoying problem with pluto crashes that occur upon a specific operation sequence.


The operations are:

1. play a video from hd repository (divx - xvid) or from a DVD already present in the DVD reader
2. after first movie finishes, play a DVD that is not already in the DVR reader

The first playback is always ok, fluent and well performing.
Top indicates a total CPU load of 50 -60 % (I'm on a EPIA M10000 hybrid, so this is OK)


The second playback is always choppy and not fluent at all, and what is really bad is that after some 10 - 15 minutes the system automatically reboots.

During the second playback top indicates some 80 - 90 % total CPU load, and that Xfree is having a very high CPU load compared to the first playback.

It is not a matter of faulty DVD/divx, I've made several trials mixing up things.

It looks like the opening of the DVD tray (and subsequent media detection) is making some strange thing.

Also it looks like that if I quick reload router before second playback, things are going well, i.e playback is fluent and system is not hanging (at least not until now).

I've read on ivtv site that sometimes this may be caused by some strange DMA problems between PVR 350 and VIA chipset, even if it sounds pretty strange to me according to the great number of set top box based on this hardware.

Can anyone explain me what is happening and help me to fix this issue?

TIA
Marco

[archived]

Hi all

I'm facing a very annoying problem with pluto crashes that occur upon a specific operation sequence.


The operations are:

1. play a video from hd repository (divx - xvid) or from a DVD already present in the DVD reader
2. after first movie finishes, play a DVD that is not already in the DVR reader

The first playback is always ok, fluent and well performing.
Top indicates a total CPU load of 50 -60 % (I'm on a EPIA M10000 hybrid, so this is OK)


The second playback is always choppy and not fluent at all, and what is really bad is that after some 10 - 15 minutes the system automatically reboots.

During the second playback top indicates some 80 - 90 % total CPU load, and that Xfree is having a very high CPU load compared to the first playback.

It is not a matter of faulty DVD/divx, I've made several trials mixing up things.

It looks like the opening of the DVD tray (and subsequent media detection) is making some strange thing.

Also it looks like that if I quick reload router before second playback, things are going well, i.e playback is fluent and system is not hanging (at least not until now).

I've read on ivtv site that sometimes this may be caused by some strange DMA problems between PVR 350 and VIA chipset, even if it sounds pretty strange to me according to the great number of set top box based on this hardware.

Can anyone explain me what is happening and help me to fix this issue?

TIA
Marco

Hi Marco,

This problem seems to have many of the symptoms of a problem we spotted in early Dec under 2.0.0.33. This was caused by a bug in UpdateMedia and was fixed very quickly with a patch and then incorporated in 2.0.0.34.

We have 4 Pluto test systems currently running under 2.0.0.34 (none with MD's based on the Epia M10000 however) and none of these currently exhibit any of these symptoms. I assume that you have updated to 2.0.0.34?

Not sure if that helps you much though!

Andrew

[archived]

Hi Andrew and thanks for your reply

You assumption is correct, I'm currently running pluto 2.0.0.34.

By looking better at my setup I suspect that .34 update replaced my "hacked" xfree server (that is patched to use EPIA Unichrome video driver) with a standard one.

Actually the problem seems to hit Xserver performaces, and this may be caused (besides of the Update media bug that you mentioned) also by some non optimal xfree version for my hardware.

I will investigate on this and will let you know

Thanks and regards
Marco