Support and General Use > Hardware

H320 freezes/crashes

<< < (3/3)

RDP:
More testing:

Converting some of my ALAC collection to FLAC to test has given excellent results = no crashes. I am suspicious of the ALAC decoder; watching the VIEW BUFFERING THREAD there seems to be consistency:

OGG/MP3/FLAC/WAV: CPU Frequency goes up to 124 until pcm: becomes full, then drops to 45mhz and pcm: hovers (it is always active) near the top of 100%. Upon track change the cycle starts again (124mhz until pcm: becomes full). I don't seem to get crashes.

ALAC: CPU Frequency goes up to 124 until pcm: becomes full, then drops to 45mhz and pcm: quickly goes down (takes about 2 seconds) to 75%, then cpu switches to 124mhz to get pcm: back up to 100%. This goes on constantly (cpu high - low cycle) while a single track/file is playing. I am now believing this cpu going up and down constantly gives me the crashes. Note on crashes: I don't know when they will happen, sometimes after a minute or two, sometime after 10 minutes , there is no pattern I can tell.

Question: I believe pcm: goes to 100% as the whole file (or what can fill the memory buffer) is decoded. That's why the boost is not needed after pcm: becomes full, the heavy work of decoding has finished. If that is normal operation then why does ALAC need to keep boosting the cpu to keep pcm: full after the initial main decode operation? It seems strange, and seems to be officially not reccomended "First of all, it draws more power. Secondly, the frequency switch itself takes time, and the tick timer will lose accuracy. On the Coldfire, the PLL takes up to 10ms to lock on the new frequency. Because of this, we should not switch frequency too often." Link: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DynamicCPUFrequency

P.S. I really don't want to have to convert my whole collection to FLAC because of this issue, but it seems that ALAC is not working for me, and I don't know how to fix this.


thanks,
RDP

RDP:
It have been over a month now, and things are much better by not using FLAC. I will try to post this as a bug.

thanks all, it's been long process to get to this point to have confidence in what the issue was.

P.S. I still have occasionally crashes, but different errors, and in total way, way less than before, and the Buffering Thread behaves normally (as expected).

happy to answer any questions.

thanks,
RDP

saratoga:
Looking at the benchmarks for CF, ALAC runs at about 200% realtime, so it should spend about half of its time at 124 MHz, half lower. 

RDP:
I can post a video if it's helpful. Please let me know.

thanks,
RDP

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page