[vdr] ARM crashed while cutting, VDR watchdog timer failed.

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

I did a simple vdr cutting: setting two marks and starting
the cutting process. Then I wanted to see how far the new
recording was, so I brought up the recordings menu, selected
the %name entry and pressed OK twice.
The picture on my screen disappeared, but vdr's watchdog
timer did not catch the error.

Here is what the logs say:

Dec 30 02:22:02 vdr vdr[3053]: creating directory /video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens
Dec 30 02:22:02 vdr vdr[3053]: creating directory /video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec
Dec 30 02:22:02 vdr vdr[3053]: loading /video/Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec//marks.vdr
Dec 30 02:22:02 vdr vdr[3053]: playing '/video/Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec/001.vdr'
Dec 30 02:22:02 vdr vdr[3053]: recording to '/video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec/001.vdr'
Dec 30 02:22:03 vdr vdr[3169]: video cutting thread started (pid=3169)
Dec 30 02:22:03 vdr vdr[3053]: info: Editing process started
Dec 30 02:22:05 vdr vdr[3053]: max. latency time 3 seconds
Dec 30 02:22:10 vdr vdr[3105]: output thread ended (pid=3105)
Dec 30 02:22:10 vdr vdr[3106]: input thread ended (pid=3106)
Dec 30 02:22:17 vdr vdr[3053]: max. latency time 6 seconds
Dec 30 02:23:36 vdr vdr[3053]: loading /video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec//marks.vdr
Dec 30 02:23:36 vdr vdr[3053]: replay /video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec
Dec 30 02:23:36 vdr vdr[3053]: playing '/video/%Humoristen_des_Nordens/2001-12-26.18:28.50.98.rec/001.vdr'
Dec 30 02:23:39 vdr vdr[3178]: output thread started (pid=3178)
Dec 30 02:23:39 vdr vdr[3179]: input thread started (pid=3179)
Dec 30 02:23:53 vdr kernel: dvb0: ARM crashed!
Dec 30 02:26:31 vdr vdr[3169]: end video cutting thread

after this, I pressed Ctrl-C in the vdr shell window
and VDR still did not go away. 
So I entered "killproc vdr" in another shell, which finally
did give the following log entry (over 6 minutes late, my
watchdog timer is set to 15 seconds):

Dec 30 02:30:36 vdr vdr[3053]: PANIC: watchdog timer expired - exiting!


I have observed this exact same behaviour before, so I guess
it should be easy to reproduce.
Assuming that the firmware bug that causes the ARM to crash
hard to fix, is there a workaround in vdr that could be 
implemented? Maybe an extra usleep somewhere?

And why does the watchdog timer not work?

I am using kernel 2.4.16-xfs.

Carsten.