Connection loss and reboot issue reloaded

[rpedde]

I don’t know if I can help with debugging or isolating (2), because the only dual-core machine I have here is my wife’s Mac Mini (and the MacFirefly builds seem to have a fairly high “degree of difficulty” right now). I do have a Xeon laptop (the Xeon CPU appears to be two CPUs to Windows XP, and behaves that way as far as threads being thrown across them, just there are really only two instruction queues rather than two actual cores); would testing Firefly on that box give you any useful information for the deadlock/race problem?

I actually went out and got a mini this weekend, and I was going to load whindows on it since that’s the platform that was reported to be trivially reproducible on. I got as far as putting the cd in and booting before I was too repulsed to continue.

I’ll try again to muster up the courage tonight.

But to answer the question, yes, a HT machine with HT enabled should show up the problem, too.

— Ron

[grommet]

Yep, all my “Firefly hangs with SMP” reports (in Roku firefly forum) reproduce on: Hyperthreaded single Intel CPUs, Dual Core CPUs, Two Single Core CPUs, and Two Dual Core CPUs. 🙂 Oh yeah, and Hyperthreaded Dual Core CPUs, too. 8) The more, the merrier…

[Ted Harper]

@Ted Harper wrote:

@rpedde wrote:

I think there are two issues here.. one is the “sb gets stupid” one, where it just won’t connect to anything until you reboot it, and the other is a ff deadlock that people report happen particularly on dual core systems.

I’m not sure on 1, but I think there is probably new firmware soonish, and #2 is waiting on me to get a dual core system up and running for better debugging.

Thanks Ron, the one I see is (1) and for me at least it definitely seems related to “something being changed on Firefly while the Soundbridge is switched on and connected via RSP” (even if the SB isn’t actually playing something), but not 100% repeatable – I haven’t had the “sb gets stupid” problem for a while now _except_ when I have changed Firefly underneath it. I haven’t had Firefly lock up and require restarting for a couple of weeks or so – when the “sb gets stupid” problem happens it is only the SB I am powering off/on, not touching Firefly (and after the SB cold restart all is well again).

I just had the “sb gets stupid” issue again (exactly as described previously – sb stopped playing and couldn’t reconnect to any libraries and needed a power off/on to get going again).

The SB hadn’t been rebooted for about 24 hours (since updating to the refreshed 2.5 beta 11 firmware), and it had played a bit of music from Firefly and streamed Radio Paradise for a couple of hours with no issues.

Anyway, the “sb gets stupid” thing happened when it was streaming Radio Paradise this time (and NOT playing from Firefly). I didn’t touch the Firefly server machine at/around the time the SB stopped working, but it _was_ to the exact minute 6 hours since the Firefly PC was started-up. I don’t know how/why such a time-based interaction would happen, especially because the SB wasn’t playing from Firefly, but it seems a co-incidence that it happened right on a time like that. Normally I don’t have the Firefly PC even booted-up when I am listening to Radio Paradise, so I don’t know if any such interaction (if there is one) would have happened any time previously either.

No LAN or internet issues at that time either, and I didn’t have to do anything to the Firefly service or the PC it was running on, just power off/on the Soundbridge (doing a reboot via the menus didn’t allow it to reconnect to the WLAN, only a power off/on brought it properly back to working).

Interesting, and definitely a new (2.5 betas in the last month or so) issue. Not sure there is anything to be “fixed” in Firefly about this, but the “exactly 6 hours after starting Firefly” nature of the SB going stupid was too much of a seeming co-incidence for me not to post to here about it…

ted.h.

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