Hello We use embedded devices running debian lenny (kernel 2.6.31.4 with bttv driver 0.9.18) to monitor an incoming video signal digitized via a video grabber. The /dev/video0 device is opened and closed several hundred times a day. We used to use an em28xx USB based grabber but now switched to an Mini-PCI bttv card (Commel MP-878) due to USB issues. With the bttv card we experience different crashes, usually after a couple of days, while the systems using the em28xx show none even after an extended time frame. The crashes differ strongly. We saw system freezes and also a very interesting problem, where libasound.so.2 couldn't find some symbol. We debugged the latter case, finding that all applications using libasound.so.2 no longer worked, giving the same error of a symbol not found. The problem could be remedied by flushing the kernel cashes (echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches). So it might be possible that the systems using the bttv Mini-PCI card corrupt memory after a couple of days, resulting into different failures. To examine the crashes I wrote a small test program, which simply opens and closes the bttv video device repeatedly: #!/bin/bash count=0 while [ 1 == 1 ] do ((count++)) date; echo "COUNT = " $count mplayer -frames 10 -fs -vo xv tv:// -tv norm=pal:input=1 > /dev/null sleep 0.1 done With this program I experienced full hard crashes after 85 counts, 760 counts and 3870 counts today, comprising between a couple of minutes and hours. In all cases the hardware watchdog timer resetted the system. The exact same system using an USB ex28xx based grabber instead of the bttv does not crash. 1.) Is there a way to diagnose memory corruption in order to ensure that it is really a corruption problem and to locate the possible bug? 2.) Do newer kernel versions have improved bttv drivers (maybe even with patched memory corruption issues)? 3.) As a last resort: Do you know of other Mini-PCI video grabber cards that are based on other chipsets that are supported by the kernel? Thanks a lot for any help Michael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html