[msfc]

Since upgrading(?) my Celeron-(AMD-64)-based system from Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) to 11.04 (Natty) the XBMC music player keeps hanging. Sometimes it happens after a few minutes, sometimes it plays for 20 ~ 30 minutes before hanging.

The UI and visualization keeps running. The music stops. i see 2 xbmc processes listed. I can kill one but not the other. It is clearly deadlocked in a mutex wait.

If I press the pause/play button a couple of times the UI will hang as well.

I am running "XBMC 2:10.1~ppa1~lucid" which appears to be the latest version. I ran through the ppa installation sequence and got the following warnings:

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/ppa/u...ce/Sources 404 Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/ppa/u...4/Packages 404 Not Found

[The important part of the above links is not displayed. It is "ubuntu/dists/natty/main". In other words it was looking for a Natty specific version but did not find one.]

Later comes a message telling me I have the latest version. Are there no updates for 10.10 Maverick or 11.04 Natty?

Is anyone else suffering this problem? Searches for "natty hangs" and "natty deadlocks" did not find anything in the forums. Is it a known problem with a fix available?

[msfc]

I forgot one, possibly important detail. The music files are being read from a Windows share on a network disk. The hang happens with both wired and wireless LAN.

It just happened again so I can provide some more exact details.

The 2 processes are: xbmc and xbmc.bin. After the hang, XBMC is sleeping in do_wait. XBMC.bin is active using lots of CPU (185%), possibly for the visualization. If I send a kill signal to xbmc.bin it goes into futex_wait_queue_me while using 98% - 100% of the cpu time, the visualization stops and the UI freezes. A kill signal to xbmc does kill it. I cannot kill XBMC.bin. It remains in futex_wait_queue_me consuming 98% - 100% cpu time. Clicking the close button on the XBMC window does not close XBMC. It did not close it before I killed process XBMC either.

[wsnipex]

there is no stable xbmc version for natty in this ppa

you could use unstable or use another ppa or compile from git

[msfc]

After an update to Ubuntu kernel 2.6.38-10-generic #46-Ubuntu the problem happens much less frequently. It played just over 40 minutes before hanging.

When still running Lucid, I had this problem when I had a flaky wireless network driver and was using the wireless network. In Natty with the previous kernel, wireless was essentially broken so I was using wired (100Mbps). With the latest kernel, the problem has not (yet) happened with wireless (N) only with wired.

There is not much to go on, but it looks to me like the deadlock is triggered by dropouts or delays on the network. Other applications using the network keep functioning fine; only XBMC hangs.

[msfc]

Hangs also happen with a wireless (N) LAN connection.

I believe this is a an XBMC player problem rather than an Ubuntu problem because no other program seems to have a problem. It might be just the XBMC music player. I've been able to play an entire DVD from my network disk without a hang. But, given the rarity of the hangs, I cannot say for sure.

[X3lectric]

can try updating your xbmc to a recent version a few fixes about music library were introduced.

[hoodride]

In your sound preferences, how many devices do you have? If more than one, disable one. In your sound preferences do you have the same profile listed there that is listed in your XBMC setup? Additionally, XBMC could be "hanging" because of the kernel mismatch, I would suggest completely uninstaling followed with a fresh install.

[msfc]

Thanks to X3lectric and hoodride for the suggestions. I have not had time to follow through and I am about to leave on a trip. It will likely be a couple of months before I can get back to this.

I do have one question for hoodride. Are you talking about the Ubuntu sound preferences?

[msfc]

Working through hoodride's suggestions, I ended up installing "XBMC PRE-11.0 compiled 9/28/2011" from the unstable channel. This too suffers from the hangs. I cannot provide any quick way to reproduce the problem. It typically plays for 30 - 45 minutes in Party Mode before hanging. Sometimes it plays for a much longer time. All my music files are .flac 2.0 played from a network disk (Buffalo LZ/WG) mounted on the XBMC system using smb.

I was attempting to re-install Dharma but no build for Natty is available so I had to move to the unstable channel.

For what it is worth, only one audio device appears in my Ubuntu preferences, the one I am using. It is the IEC958 output on the integrated Intel audio/video controller.

[msfc]

Forgot to mention, that kill -9 will kill the deadlocked thread I mentioned earlier.

[msfc]

I have opened bug 12056 about this problem.