Hi, I've been trying to set up sleep/wakeup type behaviour on R4V5. The Wiki has WakeupToRecord. Looks great, with the associated green benefits in both the wallet and environmental sense. Unfortunately, I'm having problems with it.

[Edit: problems are resolved and reflected in the Wiki - all that's left is some odd behaviour where "halt" causes "reboot" - possibly unrelated]

I still have to do more diagnostics, but the oddest thing is that when I did "halt" at the command line, the machine now does a reboot. Does anyone know why that might happen? I haven't messed with runlevels or anything.

Probably related to this halt/reboot, when MythTv tries to shut down because it's idle, the machine just endlessly reboots. I had the idle timeout set to 10s, so I only had a short time to get in and disable it! [Edit: the problem wasn't related - turns out I missed a step in the instructions and didn't test it properly - see below]

Tangentially, the anonymity of the Wiki lowers the barrier to participation, but it does mean you don't know who to contact about topics...

Oh yeah, a further question: if you halt from the KnoppMyth menu, will the halt command configured in mythtv-setup be executed? i.e. will the machine later wake up appropriately?

not sure about the first question, but I do have an answer to the second question the halt command from the knoppmyth menu runs whatever command is in the .xml file. I believe it's just shutdown -h now, but it has nothing to do with anything in mythtv-setup.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

That wiki entry would be mine... sorry I didn't put an email address in it, but I find that any email address I put into something like that quickly gets flooded with spam.

I just realized I forgot that one must run lilo after editing lilo.conf. I've updated it. Maybe that was your problem?

Is your lilo.conf correct? The PowerOff image should be set to simply shutdown. Maybe you could post it.

Did you check "block shutdown before client connected"? This should have stopped the backend from rebooting the computer immediately.

Finally, try testing the shutdown and reboot commands directly:

"sudo lilo -R PowerOff ; sudo reboot" should reboot the computer into an image that simply shuts down (this is necessary to update the wakeup time correctly when it changes)

"sudo halt" will shutdown the system directly.

As for the halt causing a reboot, this is strange... what time is set in the BIOS for the wakeup? Maybe the BIOS is causing a wakeup for some reason.

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

The wakeup will not be set if the halt command is used. This is "Problem #3" in wiki. You can change the halt command to be "killall mythfrontend" (once everything is working) and then the backend will set the time correctly and shut down the computer after 10 seconds.

I've added more warnings to the wiki plus an reference back to me.

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

First, thanks for the Wiki entry Alien - it's a good one.

I did run lilo and check "block shutdown". My lilo.conf has the Wiki "2b" option exactly (no additional lines).

I found one problem - I'd failed to correctly add lilo to /etc/sudoers. (I tested while logged in as root ). Now, as mythtv user, if I run "sudo lilo -R PowerOff; sudo reboot", it does exactly what it should do - shuts down, restarts when it is set to. This explains why I had the endless rebooting, and the tests you've now added to the Wiki would have caught this.

This doesn't explain my halt/rebooting oddness! And further, if I try to set startup to 10 minutes from now:



It actually seems to set it up for 5 minutes from now, not 10. If I change it to "+ 900", it sets it for 10 minutes out. So, perhaps my nvram-wakeup config isn't setting the values correctly, and this is leading the BIOS to do a sort of 'panic reboot'...

My mobo is Dell, for which I have little info. I made a conf file for it following the nvram-wakeup instructions. Since I think it needs the reboot, so I added the line "need_reboot = ON_ANY_CHANGE" to the conf, which results in the right return value for your perl script. (by the way, what does the >>8 do to the nvram-wakup call's return value? I would have imagined it was a shift operator which wouldn't make sense).

If I run either "halt", "init 0", or "shutdown -r now", from the command line, it reboots. At the moment the only way I seem to be able to halt the machine is with "lilo -R PowerOff; reboot"!

I have further investigation to do... I can see I have to take my monitor into the living room. It's unfortunate that PVR350 can't have the console output to the TV.

According to the man pages, nvram-wakeup subtracts 5 minutes from the startup time to give the computer time to reboot (the time given is assumed to be the time the computer should be functioning).

That's just the way perl's system command works. I think the lower 8 bits are used for system's RC and the upper for the command that it executed. Shifting right 8 bits results in nvram-wakeup's return code.


This is strange. Does "shutdown -h now" work? If not, you might want to try nvram-wakeup -d (to disable) or knoppmyth-nvram-shutdown 0. Maybe your MB is waking up because the previous wakeup was so recent...

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

I missed that (actually, I still can't find it). So at least it's working correctly. In fact, your whole system is working correctly, thanks.



Ah, typo, I meant "shutdown -h now" - it reboots for me, just like "halt" or "init 0". I'm pretty sure they all just run "init 0" anyway.

So I still have my init/reboot mystery, but it looks like the wakeup system is working fine in R4V5 - I'll annotate the Wiki. Thanks for your help!

An additional report - I've had to disable it, because it's proven unreliable. The backend keeps crashing, something to do with commercial detection.

It seems mythbackend doesn't prevent shutdown when commercial detection jobs are running. When it starts up, it usually finds some commercial detection jobs to do from the last run, starts them, and sometimes segv's, leaving the machine running but no MythTv.

I disabled the auto-shutdown and all seems to be happy again.

I seem to attract bizarre behaviour: if I ran mythbackend interactively (user mythtv or root), it didn't segv, but it segv's if I run it from root as 'su - mythtv "mythbackend"', or via /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend.

This is all in R4V5. When I decide to move to R5, I'll give it another go. For now, I don't really have enough time and inclination to investigate.