spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Still in the middle of the process of getting closer to my N900, I have had suddden crashes lately that I cannot understand happening. The battery is in good capacity, so that should not have been the reason. Today it switched itself off in the middle of a call and I kept talking to thin air, because I did not realize it was off, then during a file transfer later today it took a break as well.

I checked in the syslog, but am not clear abbout why this is happening.

Maybe one of you weathered experts have a hint?

Here's some unsolicited quotes from the book of horrors:

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Have you modified anything? Overclocked, CSSU, power kernel?

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Is there anything in the syslog from just before what you just posted? From the first line it appears that mce told dsme to shutdown and the rest of the log you posted is the process of shutting down.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Have you changed the file /etc/mce/mce.ini ?
In the log I see "DSME: shutdown request received from pid 832: /sbin/mce" maybe something wrong in the file /etc/mce/mce.ini, mce go down and the dsmetool request a reboot for resolve the problem.
I hate dsme, it is too much windows like.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Yes, guilty on all charges: overclocked to 805, CSSU installed, power kernel wl (courtesy lxp) installed...

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Hi, retsaw

here are some lines up from syslog.old - if you see anything there that might help finding out, it would be great:

cheers!

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Actually, before I did not. Now I have, as I was searching frantically for something mentioned here in the forum about a "power-off-mode set to 0 instead of 1 in order to remove spontaneous rebooting issues in ancient N900s. But I wasn't able to find it.

Nevertheless, while at it, I changed some of the things moderately that were slightly annoying before, and now the dimming and behaviour when the N900 is connected to the charger are more to my taste.

Maybe not the best way of going about troubleshooting (I should have left the stuff alone in order to find out what it really is that causes the spontaneous reboots, but can always revert to a saved copy of mce.ini).

I am thinking it could be a battery related topic, and am waiting for the replacement batteries I ordered last week.

And yes, I can dimly remember "config.sys" :D

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

If I'm reading the syslog right it says the shutdown was from you pressing the power key. I think the default settings are that a long press just turns it off, are you sure you weren't holding the powerkey down before it turned off?

Although it seems this occasion was caused by you pressing the power button, another cause can be if the contacts on the battery aren't tight enough it can lose contact with the ones on the N900, if this is a problem you can bend the contacts on the battery closer together using something like a needle.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Good thing I just came back from picking up two new Polarcell 1400mAh batteries I bought last week. One of them is now being charged and I will see what difference it will make.

I am pretty sure I did not push the power-button, so maybe there is a disconnect somewhere in the battery. I'll check back and report.

Thanks again everybody for your support!

cheers.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Taking this as a hint to remove potential hazards, I uninstalled CSSU and removed the overclocking. I kept the power-kernel for the moment. This resulted in an even less usable N900. Trying to restore Optfs with Backupmenu 0.65 that I had installed proved to be tricky as well. Let's see what else the day brings...

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

For the records: overclocking does not seem to be the culprit, as I am getting spontaneous reboots in certain moments still, with conky showing me 250 MHz. Loading the bleeding edge drivers sometimes leads to my N900 giving up, from time to time. Getting the N900 to access my home WiFi when coming back from 3G/3.5G to the home-office always requires a restart frenzy (sometimes I just give up).

I have not been able to return to my home WiFi to be encrypted yet, which gives me a headache (There is some equipment in the WDS setup that disallows WEP, and WPA/2 does not work at all yet with my N900).

I do realize that a WDS, comprised out of several APs might not be the preferred terrain for the N900, but unfortunately, that's how things are here.

So I am struggling on with my spontaneous reboots.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

Thread revival time: Overclocking is definitely not the culprit here (unless your N900 is used and was heavily overclocked before). Prolonged overclocking CAN be the culprit of spontaneous CPU damage if the overclocking is taxing enough on the CPU's electronics to damage it, BUT, I for one, have never overclocked the N900 and I have a nice history with spontaneous reboots. Well, nice in that spontaneous reboots just love me, and my N900 was and still is plagued with them since a LOOOOONG time ago.

I find R&D mode turned on, with watchdogs and lifeguard reset flags turned on to disable those 'features', helps tremendously with spontaneous reboots (if you're willing to occasionally have something crash in the background, that would normally cause a spontaneous reboot by something killing something else, and wait with bated breath to see if it'll restart on its own, or if you'll have to manually shut down the device.) But, for example, just yesterday morning my N900 had either hildon-desktop or x.org or something crash, and not everything restarted. (I suspect it was x.org that crashed because for a moment I saw the kernel's framebuffer console - which normally gets covered - assuming it's enabled in the first place - when x.org starts during boot.)

Some of the stuff restarted, and I got my current window re-displayed. But keyboard input crashed and didn't come back, as did whatever part of hildon lets you switch windows. ANYWAY, the virtual keyboard remained working and I had the chance to finish a PM I was writing on here, before shutting the device off.

So R&D mode can alleviate some of the problems (if you edit /sbin/preinit to disable the keyboard flickering when screen is locked, to keep battery consumption the same) of spontaneous reboots, although, honestly, it depends on the exact nature of the spontaneous reboots.

Worth a try, at any rate.

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

I'm in rd-mode with the watchdogs and dsme reboots disabled and I have no problems. (I never had many problem with spontaneous reboot but I prefer to not have the phone rebooting if I kill some process too rapidly.)

Modify sleep_ind 1 to sleep_ind 0 in /etc/pmconfig to avoid keyboard flickering (no need to mess with /sbin/preinit)

Re: spontaneous shutdowns - why?
 

*Shrug* That works too. I change it in /sbin/preinit to keep my modified-system-files minimal (less restoring time after a reflash) - and more importantly because that's where I originally figured out how to disable it. (Since I was messing in /sbin/preinit to get my boot-shell script to launch as early as possible.)