fcam - n900 - mysterious reboot

Question

I wrote an application to take pictures and well it takes pictures, but it also randomly reboots.

How can I determine what caused it? Do I need to observe FCam events or can I just write a simple application that takes pictures?

Walter

Answer 1

there are few causes of reboots and hints where to look for, related to camera on N900/Maemo5:

1. (huge) memory leaks mentioned above by Walter may drain your swap and cause reboot
2. there is HW watchdog which fires when some binary app messes heavily with pointers, array boundaries, etc and hangs CPU on itself (then process, which resets HW WD periodically, does not reset it and HW WD pulls power off)
3. DSP/ISP subsystem may still be less than perfect, coupled with own DMA it might cause interesting, entertaining sometimes, behavior.
4. xwindow/SGX can have interesting behavior along camera working.

now, this is still Debian machine only ARM not x86 - enable R&D mode and get syslog giving you some info to start analysis