Soft Lockup?

[krass]

Has anyone yet determined what causes the "soft lockups"? What is happening on my Sage system is that after about 1/2 hour to an hour of "LiveTV", the screen just decided to hang. I've looked at the process list, and basically Sage is taking up about 1 percent utilization every 10-15 seconds or so, where when it is running normal, it is pulling around 15-20 percent. Memory utilization seems to be normal, never gets over 100meg. The odd thing is that I can just change the channel and change it back and it seems to start working for a while again.

I am currently running Java 1.4.2_04, the latest beta for the PVR350/250's, and Windows XP w/SP1.

If there is any information that you would like, please let me know.

Athlon 2400
512 PC2700 DDR
2 - Hauppauge 250
Hauppauge 350
ATI 9600 SE Pro
Component Video Adapter for ATI (DVI - HD)
SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2
80GB primary drive ATA133
160GB SATA150
DVD R/RW
DVD ROM
SageTV + SageRecorder Software
Windows XP Pro w/sp1 w/all patches

[carlgar]

I doubt if this will be of any use to you. I have found that when I disabled hyper-threading on my CPU, I no longer have any soft or hard lock-ups. I do encounter a new problem which has kept me from being up for more than 3 days so far. The new problem is that the system will now reboot itself and create a dump for MS. Perhaps these dumps will help track down the 350 related issues.

[krass]

I'm not sure about the Athlon and Hyperthreading, I thought that was only in the P4's, but again, I'm not 100% positive.

I can only hope that they resolve this soon. I really think that Sage is the best PVR software on the market, at least for the Win32 side.

Thanks for the help Calgar, any help is appreciated!

[carlgar]

Originally posted by krass
I'm not sure about the Athlon and Hyperthreading, I thought that was only in the P4's, but again, I'm not 100% positive.

Yes, that is why I had doubts about the usefulness of the information. Although, I still think it could be speed related by turning off hyper-threading I am cutting my speed in half.
I am becoming more convinced that the 350 driver is writing in memory that it has no business with. I just encountered another one of the crashes and this time it appear to have destroyed the Sage properties file. I realy think the driver problem just causes more or less random results that could be dependent upon the speed you are running at. The faster you run the more problems you are likely to encounter.

[krass]

there are a couple things that are funny about these soft-lockups. One is that it will continue to record any of my favorites, and another is that after a few minutes, the video will start up again.

Last night around 11pm I loaded the Beta of Java2JRE with the hopes that it would fix this problem (long shot, I know), and it seemed to have helped, it didn't seem to lock until this morning, but again, I wasn't watching it so it might have locked and then started back up.

Until they get this 350 issue resolved, i think I'm just going to use Sage as an expensive VCR.

[krass]

Would it be better to run just Client/Server, instead of running Sage on just one machine? And if so, I'm assuming that the client should be fine running on a PIII550/128MB-RAM/10-GB drive, with a PVR350 for output?

[carlgar]

I think that would work as long as you are using hardware decoding only. It would be a very interesting test.

[krass]

I'll give it a try and see what happens.

[robertmcox]

I had a similar problem...

...except I couldn't get Sage to wakeup.

I found that running a chkdsk /f/r/v (scan for bad clusters) fixed the issue as I have an el cheapo maxtor (crapstore) disk drive.

[krass]

Ya know.... I never thought that that could be the problem, but I'll give it a try. Somtimes I forget to try the good'ol methods of troubleshooting. I should know in about an hour or so.

Thanks for the feedback.

[krass]

Guess that wasn't the problem. Next is to try Sage Client.

[tlimon]

I noticed a similar issue when I choose to watch a show while it's being recorded. (e.g. goto the epg, scroll down to get to the show with the red box around it, choose "watch now") After about 10 mintes, the screen freezes and the remore becomes unresponsive. It resolves itself after 15 seconds or so. The recorded file looks fine. It doesn't happen if I watch live tv (even after a manual pause and resume) It's not a hard drive issue because is happens with both the native drive and a network drive. Can one of you Guru's help me?

[krass]

I'd love to know why my LiveTV locks up, and why the recorded shows lockup when viewing them. I'm still working on getting the client/server piece setup, should be done this weekend, and we'll see if that works.