[linux-dvb] Problems with budget dvb-s cards

[a.share@t-online.de (Andreas Share)]

Hi,

i and some other people from vdrportal.de have some trouble using budget
cards, because the card "died" after some time.

In my case there are Skystar2 rev 2.6c and Nova budged (like budget-ci)
cards and a fullfeatured rev. 1.5 card  (all of them use the stv0299
friontend, but other reported the same problem with a skystar rev 2.3 with
mt312 frontend driver)  "sharing" all the same problem.

In my case all cards runs as 2. or 3. card (with a ff 1.3 as promary device)
with vdr 1.3.11 and works as expected after driver load. But after some time
(with activ vdr epg-scanning) the card "die". This means there is no
audio/video any more. I can all cards still tune and i get a normal lock,
but i receive no program. the SS2 runs for 2-3h, the nova and rev. 1.5 up to
12h. Reload of the card spezified driver part (skystar2.ko, budget-ci.ko,
dvb_ttpci) will bring the cards back in a working condition....

In this case there are no more handled IRQ´s to see in /proc/interrupts for
the card. I have tried to debug this on a second computer with a rev 1.3 as
primary and a second skystar2 as secondary card. The only i have seen is
that i get no more interrupt handler calls after some time, but the last
call was handled cleanly with IRQ_HANDLED as result. The driver itself seems
to work, because it continue open/close stream/feeds.

I see two possibilities at the moment: no more data from the demod, or some
deeper laying problem.

I have tested with:
1. Athlon XP2600+ nforce2, mdk 10.0 with vanilla 2.6.6 kernel and different
cvs driver from the last weeks with rev 1.3 and skystar2
2. MSI i865pe with celeron 2.4, mdk 10.0 with vanilla 2.6.6 kernel / Suse
9.1 with (almost) vanilla 2.6.7 kernel with rev. 1.3 as primary, rev. 1.5 as
secondary and the skystar2/nova budget as thirt card.
Both with and without acpi/apic

Stupidly i could not remember me if my other rev 1.3 cards doing the same
during epg-scan before the firmware crashed (fw_command errors and arm
crashes).

btw: I have seen the skystar2 driver calls more often
"dvb_dmx_swfilter_packets" in the irq-handler than the other cards because
it deliever single pakets every call, meanwile the tt cards deliver multiple
pakets per call. maybe some reason for the shorter runtime of th skystar2
card....

Have someone a idea or a hint doing a "deeper" debugging?

Andreas