Rich,
4 PVR 500s is a heavy DMA load for any system. What motherboard does this
system employ? What chipset does the motherboard have?
VIA chipsets, for example, are particularly prone to DMA issues. A lockup
due to a DMA issue can cause all sorts of issue, including your hard drive
going offline.. which can account for the kernel being able to respond to
a ping, but do little else.
If you want to verify such a problem (and you have the ram for it), a
quick test would be to use knoppix loaded into ram (or other ram based
distro). This way, if the drives go MIA, you will still be able to ssh in
and check things out.
There are many other things that can be done, including quite a few
debugging options you can turn on in the kernel. You could try a serial
console, for example.... and this would allow you to see kernel messages
before the lockup.
On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 15:58:49 -0800
"Rich Kadel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Kernel: 2.6.18.6
> IVTV: 0.8.2
> CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 146 (Family: 15, Model: 39, Stepping: 1)
>
> I have a "generic" 4U AMD Opteron server that was running fine for long
> periods until I started using the IVTV driver. It's a CentOS 4.3
> system. I was using the default 2.6.9 kernel, but ran into this
> problem, so I upgraded to 2.6.18 and installed ITVT 0.8.2. Same
> problem:
>
> After anywhere between 6 hours and 2 days, I can no longer ssh into my
> system. Oddly, I CAN ping the system. If I bring up a monitor, the
> monitor is showing static, like the video card is messed up. My IVTV
> applications normally generate output, so I can see when the last file
> was modified (after rebooting, of course), and that is the only good way
> I know when it crashed.
>
> I have had ITVT problems/crashes before, on my Dell 2850, but that
> always gave me a kernel panic and dump so I could see a little of what
> was going on. With this system and problem, I get nothing in the logs
> at the time of the crash. Occasionally, I will see this error, but it
> does not always appear between crashes, so it doesn't appear to be the
> problem
>
> Feb 11 03:30:11 server2 kernel: ivtv3: All encoder VBI stream buffers
> are full. Dropping data.
> Feb 11 03:30:11 server2 kernel: ivtv3: Cause: the application is not
> reading fast enough.
>
> I have 4 PVR-500 cards in this system. All 8 tuners are capturing VBI.
> 3 tuners are simultaneously recording low-res video by piping
> /dev/video[n] to ffmpeg and translating it to .flv. Up until the time
> of the "crash", things appear to be recording smoothly.
>
> I assume ping works because the system hasn't actually died completely,
> and that's probably why I'm not seeing any kernel messages.
>
> Is there a way to debug this? Perhaps a SLIGHTLY more verbose output?
> (I'd hate to create an enormous log file when it might not crash for a
> couple of days again, but if there is a reasonable and helpful debug
> flag, I'll try it.)
>
> I've attached the ivtv init log messages.
>
> Thanks,
> Rich
>
> --
>
> Rich Kadel
> Appeligo, Inc.
> (858) 433-1747
> www.appeligo.com
>
>
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