Hello All, I'm sorry for a long chunk of quoted text at the end of this message (it describes the sympthoms of the problem), but looks like I got an almost reliable proof that there is something wrong with the hardware of my device :(
I tried to find some software that could be used for benchmarking and LZMA SDK (http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html) looked like an interesting option for doing it. But when run on Nokia 770, it sometimes works normally and sometimes fails with the following error message: /media/mmc1 $ time ./lzma b -d19 LZMA 4.43 Copyright (c) 1999-2006 Igor Pavlov 2006-06-04 Compressing Decompressing Error: CRC Error Command exited with non-zero status 1 real 1m 37.14s user 1m 36.10s sys 0m 0.74s As you see, it failed internal test and was unable to decompress data back correctly. LZMA is an advanced compression algorithm and uses quite a lot of memory (it shows ~20MB memory usage in top with '-d19' option). If any of the bits within this memory block has problems, it can affect data integrity and cause incorrect compression or decompression. So probably lzma can be also used as some kind of memory checker. But it may be also some problem in LZMA code and not in my Nokia 770 hardware, so I would like to ask somebody to run the same test and check if the same problem can be reproduced. You can download the sources of LZMA SDK using this link: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/lzma443.tar.bz2?download Decompress this archive, change to 'C/7zip/Compress/LZMA_Alone' directory and run 'make -f makefile.gcc' to compile it. Alternatively you can use my compiled binary: http://ufo2000.xcomufo.com/files/lzma.gz Considering that this test program works fine in scratchbox with qemu, LZMA SDK page mentions performance on ARM and the existence of LZMA debian package for ARM, I think that software bug theory is not very relevant, but it still needs to be confirmed. I will wait for feedback in order to confirm if the problem really exists in my hardware. But looks like it is a high probability that I will have to make some kind of more advanced memory checker, try to identify faulty memory physical address and experiment with badram kernel patch. On Wednesday 23 August 2006 23:09, you wrote: > > > Also I noticed that gstreamer is not very reliable, at least when using > > > it from mplayer. It can freeze or reboot the device sometimes. That's > > > not something that should be expected from high level API. If I detect > > > some reliable pattern in reproducing these bugs, I'll report it to > > > bugzilla for sure. But right now just using mplayer and lots of seeking > > > in video can cause these bugs reasonably fast. ... > Earlier I noticed problems with sound output getting blocked that could be > fixed by bult-in audio or video player. When trying to play anything it > first shows error message. After the second attempt either the sound got > fixed or the device rebooted. I suspected that something could get wrong > with dsp and standard audio player is able to reset it. That was observed > when using fdsrc element for feeding data to the decoder in mplayer. On > stopping/resuming playback, probably partial audio frames could be feeded > to mp3 decoder and that might result in its misbehaviour. ... > Now only complete mp3 audio frames can be sent to dspmp3sink. Anyway, first > everything was ok and I even suspected that I will not encounter any > problems at all. But after a few hours I got several reboots. After the > last reboot even wifi started working strange (could not connect using ssh, > it just showed various errors). Turning the device off, waiting for a few > minutes and turning it on again got everything back to normal. Now I > suspect that it could probably be overheating or some other hardware > problem (the device worked with wifi on and heavy cpu usage because of > decoding video for a long time). I'll keep an eye on it and will report > again if the problems keep showing up and if their source becomes more > clear. ... > I tried swap a long time ago on IT2005, that was done in order to make gcc > work on Nokia 770 to try compiling something before I installed > scratchbox :) Anyway, I did not like the stability as gcc started to fail > with internal compiler errors. So I decided not to use swap as long as it is > enough memory for what I need. > > Also there was some swap related report about the problem with mplayer: > http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=20068&postcount=96 > > But maybe I should give swap another try on IT2006 and see if it helps to > improve stability. > > By the way, I already asked this question in the mailing list long time > ago, but are there any tools for hardware diagnostics on Nokia 770? > Something like memtest86 could probably be very useful. > > Though availablility of hardware diagnostics tools could probably result in > more devices getting returned for replacement with otherwise undetected > problems and have negative impact on Nokia profit (just joking). _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
