0

I wrote an application to take pictures and well it takes pictures, but it also randomly reboots.

How can I determine what caused it? Do I need to observe FCam events or can I just write a simple application that takes pictures?

Walter

Walter
  • 1,290
  • 2
  • 21
  • 46
  • It looks like the application is leaking memory. Although top indicates it isn't, free reports the amount of memory available is continually shrinking when running the application. It appears that when the device runs out of physical ram, it reboots on its own. – Walter Jan 24 '11 at 16:59

1 Answers1

2

there are few causes of reboots and hints where to look for, related to camera on N900/Maemo5:

  1. (huge) memory leaks mentioned above by Walter may drain your swap and cause reboot
  2. there is HW watchdog which fires when some binary app messes heavily with pointers, array boundaries, etc and hangs CPU on itself (then process, which resets HW WD periodically, does not reset it and HW WD pulls power off)
  3. DSP/ISP subsystem may still be less than perfect, coupled with own DMA it might cause interesting, entertaining sometimes, behavior.
  4. xwindow/SGX can have interesting behavior along camera working.

now, this is still Debian machine only ARM not x86 - enable R&D mode and get syslog giving you some info to start analysis

silpol
  • 347
  • 1
  • 10
  • 29
  • 1
    Thanks for your reply. I actually did some more reading and found that the fcam drivers are not stable and do cause random reboots. So, I cannot rely on them to be flawless. – Walter Feb 09 '11 at 03:37