Dead Mk2?

Heh, did that thread title, combined with this user name, get your attention?

Thought I'd cash in on Meatballman's other thread popularity...

My player isn't dead, it's not even very ill. At least I don't think it is. But it's done something strange a few times recently.

The player app freezes up mid-song. The visuals freeze and the music stops. Almost as if someone had pressed the pause key, but without the on-screen indication of a pause.

But pressing and holding the top button still puts it into standby mode (so I can pull it from the dash and reboot it without a speaker pop). After the reboot, all works well and it even seems to remember which song it was on and remember the correct point to continue playing again.

Details:

It only started doing this recently, I made no changes to the player between the time it worked fine and the time it started doing this.

I didn't add any bad songs to the player, as far as I know. The fact that it works fine after a reboot seems to indicate it's not a bad song (if it were a bad song it'd re-cache the same songs after a reboot).

It only seems to do it after a certain amount of time playing in the car. 30-60 minutes or so.

It does not seem to be temperature-related, it still happens when I've got the cooling fan turned on. When I pull it from the sled, it doesn't feel unusually hot (it's been much hotter and ran fine).

Once, it did it while GPSApp was running in the foreground. GPSApp continued to run for quite a while, but eventually it also froze.

It does not do this on AC power, only DC power in the car. So I am unable to monitor its serial port output during the failure.

It does not do this while sitting on the passenger seat and playing from a cig-lighter adapter into a tape-input adapter in a 4wd pickup truck on a bumpy ride up to the slopes.

I tried adding [hijack] stalk_enabled=0 to the config.ini, no fix to the behavior.

I checked for the "missed interrupts" message on the serial port when it was on home power, no missed interrupts reported.

I have not seen any indications of hard disk trouble. I mean, other than this if you count this as an indication.

Software version is 2.0 final with Hijack 413.

Any other ideas?

Can you force DC power using one of Mark's docks and watch the serial port there? The fact that it does not do it on AC, even when on the seat, makes me think that it is sled / wiring related. Is your sled easy to remove, to look for loose wires on the loom (especially the serial link ones)?

Also, if not already there, turn on the HDD indicator, to see if you are getting any starved thread conditions.

Additional: Any hardware modifications? Especially on the memory end of things. Does your memory test run cleanly?

Jiffies.

Good ideas, Paul, I'll try those.

No hardware mods to the memory, but I've got the lit-button hack and I've added a fan which is running off the 3v rail.

In a way, it almost sounds like a memory leak, building until the player app can no longer allocate and crashes. That would explain why the GPSapp would still run for a while but eventually crash too. No explaination of why only on DC power, though. Unless there is something in your config.ini tied to DC vs. AC. I am also thinking it might be a bad memory hit, but (again) no explaination why only on DC.

I really wish you could capture a console log. It really seems like the player app is going down - hard. Or getting blocked by a resource request that cannot be met.

Does it happen with a vanilla config.ini?

Quote:
In a way, it almost sounds like a memory leak

Thats the same thought I had. Maybe it only happens on DC because Tony only has GPSapp running on DC and GPSapp is leaking mem? Or the player is at fault, but it only shows up on DC because there is more spare memory running on AC without GPSapp?

-Mike