[vdr] Re: Error handling vs. user friendliness.

[Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de>]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 12:06:06PM +0100, Olaf Titz wrote:
> > > Maybe, in multi card setup, instead of an emergency exit vdr could close
> > > the non-working device and call an external script to reload the module
> > > only for that card?
> > Would certainly be an improvement.  But I doubt that this is possible.
> > AFAIK, you can not remove a module while it is used.
> 
> If you close all FDs referring to that module it should be possible.

Ummm...  Let's have an example:  I have a box with two identical budget
cards here.  Both using the same set of modules.  Now we notice that
one of them seems to be upset.  How can you reload the modules just for
this one card without interrupting progress on the other card?  After
all, they is _still_ using the modules.

Thinking further about this topic, I come up with a different question:
The dvb subsystem is built of lots of modules.  Do some experiences,
statistics or speculations exist which modules are prone to crashes?
What are the symptoms of such crashes?  Maybe collecting such statistics
could help to locate the real problems?

> So let's approach that a bit more systematically.
[ ... ]

Sounds good.  Seems to be hard to implement.  OTOH, this accurate listing
of the possible situations shows clearly that an emergency exit should
only appear when there is only one card avalable.  Even if it should not
be possible to reload drivers at run-time, at least a retry on a different
card should be done and the offending card should be disabled.  In addition,
a warning on OSD and logfiles should be given.

-- 
No software patents!
-- Josef Wolf -- jw@raven.inka.de --