We’ve had a handful of reports cropping up related to HVR2200 model#89619 cards. With Ubuntu 12.04.1 the driver would attempt to load firmware from file NXP7164-2010-03-10.1.fw length 4019072 as defined in the saa7164-fw.c driver source.
(Hint: it’s not really an Ubuntu error)
Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.432854] saa7164_downloadimage() image corrupt
Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.432868] bootloader d/l has failed
Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.433068] Failed to boot firmware, no features registered
Technically, NXP have two different revisions of the SAA7164 chip, rev2 and rev3. Up until 2010 I was loading different firmware into the chips based on a revision identifier on a per card basis.
In March 2010 I received a newer firmware build from NXP that fixed some MPEG Encoder loss of signal related issues. I tested this on both DVB-T and ATSC rev2 and 3 cards, saw that it had no obvious problems then patched the saa7164-fw.c driver to use a single firmware. To the best of my knowledge it has been working fine for over two years.
Apparently not. Apparently the NXP7164-2010-03-10.1.fw firmware fails to boot specifically on the rev 89619 DVB-T cards.
Thanks to the Hauppauge Engineer Team I was given some 89619 loaner hardware to reproduce the problem on. I was able to quickly reproduce the issue with a very recent v3.6 kernel and provide a preliminary patch to correct the problem.
Oh, you’ll also need to download and install v4l-saa7164-1.0.2-3.fw firmware into your /lib/firmware directory.
This tree http://git.kernellabs.com/?p=stoth/media_tree.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/saa7164-dev contains an experimental patch to regress all saa7164 rev2 cards back to a specific rev2 firmware. It was tested with a 89619 card and the driver is loading and operating correctly.
The patch has not been regression tested against any other rev2 cards.
Update:The patch has been fully regression tested against all rev2 cards supported by the driver, the 89519 and the 89615. It’s safe to use.
Enjoy!
