System freezes every 10-30 minutes with LE 7.0.0

jhschulz · May 6, 2016 at 9:22 AM

Hi,

a few days ago I updated my media pc (Asrock Q1900-ITX mainbord with Intel J1900 CPU, 2x2GB RAM and a 30GB SSD) from OE 6.0.3 to LE 7.0.0. After that I had huge problems with system freezes every 10-30 minutes (more or less). No matter what I did, the system simply stopped working. No reaction to keybord or mouse and the network was dead. On the TV screen was a still picture, as if you had pressed "pause". All I could do in this situation was a hard power-off by holding the power button for a few seconds until power was off.

There was nothing in the logs related to this problem. The whole system (not just Kodi) stopped working, so nothing could be written to the logs!?

To make sure it's not a hardware/memory problem, I run a memory test (memtest) for several hours, but everything was ok.

As the next step I did a clean install of LE 7.0.0 from scratch, to ensure it's not a problem with the update. I only did the absolut required minimum of configuration and installed only the absolut required addons (tvheadend PVR client, Emby for Kodi and Advanced WOL - I have a separat media server that provides movies etc. via emby and live tv via tvheadend.). -> The same problems.

As my family became angry, I finally reinstalled OE 6.0.3 and the problems are gone. No freezes anymore.

Any ideas why LE 7.0.0. doesn't work on my hardware?

**Klojum** · May 6, 2016 at 12:06 PM Official Post

It could be a re-occurring kernel bug on the Baytrail boards:
109051 – intel_idle.max_cstate=1 required on baytrail to prevent crashes

jhschulz · May 9, 2016 at 9:23 AM

Is there something I can do to use LE 7.0.0 with my hardware, or do I have to wait for a bugfix in a future version?

Vzzbux · July 13, 2016 at 11:47 AM

Just to say that I have the same motherboard as OP and experienced the same issue with LibreELEC 7.0.2.
I migrated to LibreELEC from OpenELEC 6.0.3 and also had to migrate back to OE again to resolve the problem.

The kernel bug report thread that Klojum posted does still seem to be active, but I'm not confident that it will result in a proper fix any time soon, beyond the intel_idle.max_cstate workaround (that will increase power usage).

Still, I just wanted to reenforce the fact that until this is fixed or mitigated, Baytrail users will have to stick with a distribution that uses an earlier kernel version to avoid this show-stopping issue.

darvida · August 24, 2016 at 3:37 PM

Hello,

I also had this problem on OpenELEC. To resolve this problem you need to set the max C-State to C1 under the BIOS.

Code

BIOS -> Advanced -> PPM Configuration -> set Max CPU C-State to C1 (was C7)

Source: Kodi (OpenELEC) freezing on Intel J1900 based computer during movie playback

Seb

djeanprost · September 4, 2016 at 9:16 PM

Quote from Klojum

It could be a re-occurring kernel bug on the Baytrail boards:
109051 – intel_idle.max_cstate=1 required on baytrail to prevent crashes

Hello,

I opened a thread about the same topic indeed : LibreELEC.
It looks I meet the same problem. LibreElec runs (used to in fact) on a Intel J1900 that suffers the same bug.
I hope it will be fixed soon. Meanwhile I went back to openelec 6.x
Thanks.

Jim · January 9, 2017 at 3:15 AM

Can someone confirm that the kernel update has fixed the freezing problem. I have made a short test with Asrock Q1900-ITX + v7.90.010 Alpha and its rock solid so far.