Matthias Dahl wrote:

Hello all.

I am resending the following message because I didn't get any response so far and in addition I am putting it on cc' to the vdr devel list. I'd look into this issue myself, yet I don't have the necessary time to dive into the DVB tree. So please, if anyone knows how to debug this or has any hint where the problem could be located... I'd be more than grateful to hear about it.

By the way, just today after a few minutes of uptime with vdr 1.7.0, I got those (increased the CAM check interval to 5 seconds btw):

vdr: [3280] ERROR: can't write to CI adapter on device 0: Input/output error vdr: [3280] ERROR: can't write to CI adapter on device 0: Invalid argument

And the CAM stopped working until I restarted vdr. In one forum post someone reported about similar problems with MythTV, so it's becoming more and more likely that this is indeed a problem within the dvb tree. And if it's a SMP problem, it should get fixed because multicore systems will be everywhere pretty soon.

Thanks again.

---

Hello all.

After minutes or hours or days of running vdr 1.4.7, I get the following messages in my syslog:

dvb_ca adapter 0: CAM tried to send a buffer larger than the ecount size! dvb_ca adapter 0: DVB CAM link initialisation failed :(

When running vdr 1.6.x, the problems are even more frequent/worse and I get those:

dvb_ca adapter 0: CAM tried to send a buffer larger than the link buffer size (192 > 128)! vdr: [3140] ERROR: can't write to CI adapter on device 0: Input/output error dvb_ca adapter 0: CAM tried to send a buffer larger than the ecount size! dvb_ca adapter 0: DVB CAM link initialisation failed :(

The result is always the same, the CAM stops decrypting and I have to restart vdr. After a lot of searching around, I've learnt that I am not the only one with those problems and they seem to be related to multi core systems. I read that pining vdr down to one CPU core might help... and indeed it did.

This cannot be a hardware related issue because...

1. meanwhile I switched from a NForce 590 SLI to a X48 chipset and thus also from an AMD64 X2 5600+ (Winchester) to an Intel Core2Duo E8400 (Wolfdale)

2. I swapped my KNC One DVB-C Plus for a new one

And the problems persist.

I've already written a report to the vdr list which was unfortunately ignored and besides it looks more like a dvb issue itself.

I was unable to test the kernel with nosmp or similar (which was reported by others to work just fine) because I need this machine to work on.

I've attached detailed informations about my system and I'd be more than happy to help fix this once and for all, so one can savely rely on vdr again.

Last but not least, I am using a AlphaCrypt Light module with 3.15 firmware.

Thanks a lot in advance for every help.

Best regards, Matthias Dahl

Please test the attached patch (untested because I do not own this kind of hardware). Please save your work before loading the patched driver, since a locking bug might crash your machine...

CU Oliver