If the box freezes hard with bttv ... ===================================== It might be a bttv driver bug. It also might be bad hardware. It also might be something else ... Just mailing me "bttv freezes" isn't going to help much. This README has a few hints how you can help to pin down the problem. bttv bugs --------- If some version works and another doesn't it is likely to be a driver bug. It is very helpful if you can tell where exactly it broke (i.e. the last working and the first broken version). With a hard freeze you probably doesn't find anything in the logfiles. The only way to capture any kernel messages is to hook up a serial console and let some terminal application log the messages. /me uses screen. See Documentation/serial-console.txt for details on setting up a serial console. Read Documentation/oops-tracing.txt to learn how to get any useful information out of a register+stack dump printed by the kernel on protection faults (so-called "kernel oops"). If you run into some kind of deadlock, you can try to dump a call trace for each process using sysrq-t (see Documentation/sysrq.txt). This way it is possible to figure where *exactly* some process in "D" state is stuck. I've seen reports that bttv 0.7.x crashes whereas 0.8.x works rock solid for some people. Thus probably a small buglet left somewhere in bttv 0.7.x. I have no idea where exactly, it works stable for me and a lot of other people. But in case you have problems with the 0.7.x versions you can give 0.8.x a try ... hardware bugs ------------- Some hardware can't deal with PCI-PCI transfers (i.e. grabber => vga). Sometimes problems show up with bttv just because of the high load on the PCI bus. The bt848/878 chips have a few workarounds for known incompatibilities, see README.quirks. Some folks report that increasing the pci latency helps too, althrought I'm not sure whenever this really fixes the problems or only makes it less likely to happen. Both bttv and btaudio have a insmod option to set the PCI latency of the device. Some mainboard have problems to deal correctly with multiple devices doing DMA at the same time. bttv + ide seems to cause this sometimes, if this is the case you likely see freezes only with video and hard disk access at the same time. Updating the IDE driver to get the latest and greatest workarounds for hardware bugs might fix these problems. other ----- If you use some binary-only yunk (like nvidia module) try to reproduce the problem without. IRQ sharing is known to cause problems in some cases. It works just fine in theory and many configurations. Neverless it might be worth a try to shuffle around the PCI cards to give bttv another IRQ or make it share the IRQ with some other piece of hardware. IRQ sharing with VGA cards seems to cause trouble sometimes. I've also seen funny effects with bttv sharing the IRQ with the ACPI bridge (and apci-enabled kernel).