[linux-dvb] ARM crashes, what can I do to help?

[Jaakko Hyvätti <jaakko@hyvatti.iki.fi>]

  My experiences with the new av7110 firmware are that if you do not touch
the vdr OSD at all or only minimally, it does not crash when doing
simultaneous recording and playback, or when watching the same channel as
recording (transfer thread used).

  I other words, ARM crashes in less than a minute if I do something
that displays something on OSD.

  Someone suspected the MPEG decoder might have wild pointers/buffer
overruns on corrupted streams.  I have a lot of errors on some channels
and occassionally on all channels, so this would explain a lot.  Maybe the
wild pointers corrupt the firmware memory in such areas that when OSD
functions are called it might crash?  I also have a lot of strange things
happening with the OSD.  Sometimes some lines disappear, some garbage
pixels appear all over the screen etc.  This would strongly point to
memory corruption.

So to crash ARM, I guess I need:

- a corrupted MPEG stream,
- a playback or transfer thread simultaneously with recording and
- OSD activity.

  This would explain why the new firmware works for some people.  They
have clean MPEG streams.

  Now I tried to disable OSD (Use vdr DEBUG_OSD), and got no ARM crash.
Instead the machine locked up after quite a long while.  I could not
reproduce this, but could the crashing arm take PCI bus with it, or does
this kind of a lockup have to be always the drivers fault?

  These latest tests I did with vdr-1.1.13 but all versions have behaved
the same.  I am using the new head revision of the driver cvs (with DVB-C
fixed again of course) and tested also siemens_dvb-0.9.4-2002-06-23.patch
as distributed on vdr site.

  What I am trying to point out here is that I think fixing the firmware
is the only way to fix these problems.  Now the source and tools to
compile are available only to few people in the project.  How can I help?
I can crash the ARM quickly and reliably.  Should I insert some more
debugging to the driver and see if there is a pattern to which calls cause
the crash?  Please just tell me what to do.

Regards,
Jaakko

-- 
Foreca Ltd                                           Jaakko.Hyvatti@foreca.com
Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 B, FIN-00150 Helsinki, Finland     http://www.foreca.com



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