Dedicated Mythfrontend system lost sound, remote

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

I have a dedicated system to run mythfrontend, and it's been putting along happily enough for any number of years. Recently it appears to have lost both sound and remote control. I wasn't paying attention to exactly when this happened, it was around the holidays when we've spent less time in front of screens and more time in the real world with friends and family. So I can't time-slide it to any particular update, since I can't tell exactly when it was last running correctly. Obviously it's HDMI on a video card, but I got that running shortly after installing the card.

Sound first, here's the first piece of the puzzle. Obviously it's HDMI on a video card, but I got that running shortly after installing the card:

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Are you sure all the modules loaded?

I had a similar issue a few weeks ago - I update/reboot my mythtv machine very infrequently. So when I did reboot last time, I found that the PVR worked, but I couldn't use it to control the cable box through IR.

After a lot of head-scratching, I noticed that a module that was supposed to be loaded wasn't, and realized that the config in /etc/modprobe.d is no longer used.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

How do you load if not modprobe.d?

Last week I was working on a kernel, and noticed that the hd_audio section menu was missing. Usually when configuring a new kernel I grab the last config and start from there. Every now and then there are changes between kernel levels where that just doesn't work. Apparently 4.8->4.9 is one of those times. I haven't had much time, but I've started working through a new config, using tkdiff to show my how to change it into my regular config. That way I can avoid whatever poison borked hd_audio. With a little luck, the mce_usb problem is similar, and this process will clear that up as well.

Right now we're getting some work done on the house, and everything is disrupted. Maybe in a few weeks I can get back to it.
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Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

This hasn't gone away - I've just been mostly too busy with real life to work on it. In the past few weeks I've finally managed to get back to it, and have made substantial progress. However it's still not working. I believe I've identified two issues.

First issue is module loading. As others in this thread have suggested, at least part of my problem was that my modules weren't getting loaded correctly. In all of my various thrashing about, I moved to a new kernel, and after explicitly loading a few necessary modules I believe I have both sound and lirc correctly set up. However that doesn't happen automatically, and it used to.

From other things I've seen about in various thread, it appears that what broke me were changes to openrc to make it more systemd-compatible. Had there been some sort of notice or news item, this might have been easier to catch. Perhaps the best clue, other than seeing WilliamH diatribes in various places, was the message in lm_sensors update, which I still haven't properly handled.

So I believe the problem is that once upon a time, /etc/init.d/modules was run automagically, and now it isn't. Instead /etc/init.d/modules-load - the systemd-compatible thingy - is run automagically. That may have been sufficient to break my setup. It appears to me that modules-load and modules can both be used, and the latter may be more flexible in passing parameters to modules.

Now that I look a little harder, on my other systems I have "modules" set to run in "boot". But when I it shows "Runlevel: Default", "Dynamic Runlevel: hotplugged", "Dynamic Runlevel: needed/wanted", and "Dynamic Runlevel: manual". Not a peep about "sysinit" or "boot", and not a peep about "modules". My dedicated mythbacked machine isn't up at the moment, so I can't check it. Of the machines I can check, only one has real content in /etc/conf.d/modules, and most, but not all of the modules called out appear to be loaded.

Specific question #1 - What the heck is going on with module loading? How is module loading supposed to be managed, NOW? Module loading has changed several times in Gentoo, and it appears that it changed AGAIN late last year or early this year, with no real notice of what happened or how to respond. I've also looked around and find no documentation on the new, improved, cheese-deal way to specify module loading - only old documents which are the way I'm already doing it - and are failing on one system, possibly failing on another in a way I'm not noticing.

Next, even when I manually load the necessary modules, mythfrontend can no longer contact my back-end system. This is again with no other changes, and mythfrontend on my other non-dedicated systems are all able to contact my backend system with no problems. The file in /home/mythtv/.mythtv/mysql.txt looks OK. The mythfrontend itself has been recently rebuilt and is at the same level as all of the other systems. I know it can reach that system on my network, because that's where I make my nfs exports, and this machine has mounted /usr/portage and /usr/portage/distfiles successfully. It just can't contact the mythbackend, but my other machines can.

Specific question #2. Any suggestions on how to bug this one out?
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21624

I cannot comment on your module loading problem.

Do you get any interesting output from running both ends with -v all? If nothing looks obviously wrong to you in that output, you may need to seek help on the MythTV users list. If you do that, include in your post the contents of those verbose logs.