v4l bttv bt878 PCI on VIA KT133 chipset crashes?

v4l bttv bt878 PCI on VIA KT133 chipset crashes?

[Benson Chow]

Just wonderring.

I'm getting weird crashes with running the bttv driver that comes with
2.4.20 (0.7.96?) with a bt878 card.  I can record fine from it, can change
channels, etc. - Great.  Except if I keep on starting and stopping
mencoder (opening and closing /dev/video), it usually works for a few
times from a fresh reboot just fine, but after 5 times (and it's random,
it may not start till after 20 times) it *seems* other parts of kernel
space gets badly corrupted.  My kswapd oopses and dies.  Processes
cause oopses for no reason.  The oopses tend to occur in disk i/o
routines, not in the bttv driver for some reason, and after the corruption
(?) occurs, all processes can and will die.  The machine eventually goes
down hard needing a jab at the case  Not exactly a graceful shutdown!  The
machine seems to work fine if I never use the video capture card, even
thrashing disk and flooding the PCI network card seems to work fine.

I'm wonderring if anyone else is seeing this issue.  Since don't have
Windows on this machine nor even have a driver for this card that works
for any recent version of windows, I don't know if this is linux specific
or not.  My guess is it isn't (and it's some hardware incompatibility
issue) but I'd like to confirm this - anyone else have this issue?

Thanks,

-bc

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Re: v4l bttv bt878 PCI on VIA KT133 chipset crashes?

[David J. M. Karlsen]

Benson Chow wrote:
> Just wonderring.
> 
> I'm getting weird crashes with running the bttv driver that comes with
> 2.4.20 (0.7.96?) with a bt878 card.  I can record fine from it, can change
> channels, etc. - Great.  Except if I keep on starting and stopping
> mencoder (opening and closing /dev/video), it usually works for a few
> times from a fresh reboot just fine, but after 5 times (and it's random,
> it may not start till after 20 times) it *seems* other parts of kernel
> space gets badly corrupted.  My kswapd oopses and dies.  Processes
> cause oopses for no reason.  The oopses tend to occur in disk i/o
> routines, not in the bttv driver for some reason, and after the corruption
> (?) occurs, all processes can and will die.  The machine eventually goes
> down hard needing a jab at the case  Not exactly a graceful shutdown!  The
> machine seems to work fine if I never use the video capture card, even
> thrashing disk and flooding the PCI network card seems to work fine.
I had problems with 2.4.20 with the same hardware and using the program 
zapping for viewing. My box just froze. I thought maybe it was caused by 
sharing interrupts - but the machine hasn't frozen yet when I switched 
over to using xawtv instead.


ints:
david@skunk:~$ cat /proc/interrupts
            CPU0
   0:   29393376          XT-PIC  timer
   1:         32          XT-PIC  keyboard
   2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
   5:    3529723          XT-PIC  ide2, ide3, bttv
   8:          4          XT-PIC  rtc
  10:     119935          XT-PIC  usb-uhci, usb-uhci, advansys
  11:    2597210          XT-PIC  via82cxxx, aic7xxx, eth0
  14:    2243192          XT-PIC  ide0
  15:    2136742          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0
LOC:   29394447
ERR:       8021
MIS:          0
david@skunk:~$


HW:
david@skunk:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] 
(rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] 
(rev 40)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus 
Master IDE (rev 06)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 16)
00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 16)
00:07.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] 
(rev 40)
00:07.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 
AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:08.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20268 
(rev 01)
00:09.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW/D / AIC-7881U (rev 01)
00:0a.0 SCSI storage controller: Advanced System Products, Inc ABP940-U 
/ ABP960-U (rev 03)
00:0c.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video 
Capture (rev 11)
00:0c.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture 
(rev 11)
00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] 
(rev 74)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400 AGP 
(rev 82)
david@skunk:~$ lspci



-- 
David J. M. Karlsen - +47 90 68 22 43
http://www.davidkarlsen.com
http://mp3.davidkarlsen.com

Re: v4l bttv bt878 PCI on VIA KT133 chipset crashes?

[Benson Chow]

David,

I've subsequently found out that the via KT133 sucks, and there's not much
that can be done.

I replaced it with a (somewhat newer Via) P4X333 chipset motherboard
(difference CPU of course) and the driver works perfectly fine.

I've heard that the KT133 and a lot of via's older chipsets cannot handle
multiple busmasters on PCI transactions properly.  I suspect disabling DMA
on the harddrive may fix the problem, but I have not looked into this
possibility as I got the new machine.

Hope this enlightens...

-bc

On Sun, 4 May 2003, David J. M. Karlsen wrote:

> Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 23:21:41 +0200
> From: David J. M. Karlsen <david@davidkarlsen.com>
> To: Benson Chow <blc@q.dyndns.org>
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: v4l bttv bt878 PCI on VIA KT133 chipset crashes?
>
> Benson Chow wrote:
> > Just wonderring.
> >
> > I'm getting weird crashes with running the bttv driver that comes with
> > 2.4.20 (0.7.96?) with a bt878 card.  I can record fine from it, can change
> > channels, etc. - Great.  Except if I keep on starting and stopping
> > mencoder (opening and closing /dev/video), it usually works for a few
> > times from a fresh reboot just fine, but after 5 times (and it's random,
> > it may not start till after 20 times) it *seems* other parts of kernel
> > space gets badly corrupted.  My kswapd oopses and dies.  Processes
> > cause oopses for no reason.  The oopses tend to occur in disk i/o
> > routines, not in the bttv driver for some reason, and after the corruption
> > (?) occurs, all processes can and will die.  The machine eventually goes
> > down hard needing a jab at the case  Not exactly a graceful shutdown!  The
> > machine seems to work fine if I never use the video capture card, even
> > thrashing disk and flooding the PCI network card seems to work fine.
> I had problems with 2.4.20 with the same hardware and using the program
> zapping for viewing. My box just froze. I thought maybe it was caused by
> sharing interrupts - but the machine hasn't frozen yet when I switched
> over to using xawtv instead.

[ system information deleted ]

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