Re: Frustrating Random Reboots, seeking suggestions

[Hui Zhou <hzhou@hzsolution.net>]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 11:01:22AM -0500, Chase Venters wrote:
>On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Hui Zhou wrote:
>>I am running a linux machine with a self programmed pvr running on it. All 
>>is well until I reinstalled the linux system a few weeks ago. Now I am 
>>suffering from random reboots. The reboots does not leave any debug 
>>messages or clues. After some isolation, I finally narrowed it down to a 
>>blankscene marking program -- bkmark. Running bkmark against any recording 
>>randomly reboots the computer. By random, I mean  it may complete 
>>sucessfully once, but repeating it for a few times, the reboots will 
>>happen.  On average, it reboots every 2 - 3 runs.
>Try to knock out any hardware problems first (run memtest86, check for 
>high heat / crappy power).
>
>If you're still having trouble, purchase a serial cable. Plug it into 
>another computer with a terminal program. Enable serial console support in 
>your kernel (and on your kernel command line). When the kernel boots, use 
>SysRq on the serial console to turn the console messaging level up to 
>maximum. If you're lucky, you'll catch some sort of diagnostics message on 
>the serial console before this happens.
>

Thanks. memtest86 passes 6 times without errors. Serial console didn't 
show up anything (it just reboots). 

Anyway, I finally suspect the debian libmpeg binary is at fault. I 
manually build it from src and statically linked to the `bkmark' 
program. It seems cured the random reboots problem. It runs 
successfully for 4 times. However, the fifth time it ended up in a `D' 
state. The only system call it uses is libc file IO and some signal 
passing. Any comment on the cause?

-- 
Hui Zhou