Emulation station freezing

mahoneyt944

mitu

@mahoneyt944 Did you start gdb via SSH ? Otherwise you won't have access to it if ES freezes.

mitu

@mahoneyt944 I added the config file to my Pi3 and left it running. Let's see if something comes up. For a moment there I was confused why I couldn't scrape, until I realized your config has Kiosk mode turned on.

mahoneyt944

@mitu I don't have ssh setup. It might be easier for me just to give you a private copy of my image to test out. It's not all that big. 4.5gb

mitu

I've left ES staying idle with the config you sent and it hasn't freezed so far. I'll leave it on longer, but I don't think it's the configuration that's causing the issue.

It might be easier for me just to give you a private copy of my image to test out. It's not all that big. 4.5gb

That might help, but it would be easier to just use the RetroPie latest image (4.7.1) and see if you can reproduce the issue with it. You can transfer your configs over (see here) after you run a full update of RetroPie-Setup and the OS.

mahoneyt944

@mitu sure I'll try reimaging and report back. Though, it's irritating to not know why exactly. I have another rpi3 build using 4.6.8 as well I can try updating on too to see if it bugs out.

What gets me is I use the 4.6.8 image 24/7 in my arcade cabinet build with no issues.

mahoneyt944

just an update,

I reimaged then updated to 4.7.11 then copied over my stuff. Seemed to work well at first but then I got a freeze. So I started reverting stuff.

Right now I believe the issue is related to my config.txt I started reverting each custom setting I had one by one and it seems the freeze is caused by gpu_freq=500. Haven't had much testing on this yet but if this is it, that means for some reason this setting no longer work for me on 4.7.11 like it was on 4.6.8 running 24/7.

mitu

@mahoneyt944 It's possible that's a side effect of an updated kernel/firmware.

EDIT: do you have the same overclock settings in your other systems ? You can keep the kernel/firmware version and just upgrade RetroPie (i.e. say no to updating OS/kernel packages).

mahoneyt944

@mitu I've tried updating without doing the underlying kernal before but that didn't work either. I'll know after a few days or less if that was the setting or not that made a fuss with the system left on.

triforcexp

I'm experiencing the same issue on a rpi3b. Just upgraded from got knows which ancient version to latest yesterday and it freezes in a few seconds.

In my case I had
gpu_freq=500
v3d_freq=525

After commenting both those seems that is working ok, though I would like to keep them as they certainly help with N64 emulation.

I remember having issues like that about two years ago when updating and I ended up adding more gpu_mem, but that didn't help this time.

I'm curious which EmulationStation version comes with the 4.6.8 image so I could try to downgrade to it?

mitu

@triforcexp said in Emulation station freezing:

I'm curious which EmulationStation version comes with the 4.6.8 image so I could try to downgrade to it?

Referenced in a post above - 2.9.1 (see the change list).

mahoneyt944

@triforcexp unfortunately for me when I updated, even without the kernal update, it still freezes. For some reason the gpu_freq is effected after the update. I commented mine out as well but I'd be interested to know if a lower value will work at all without freezing. This needs dug into a bit more to figure out why this setting is problematic now.

triforcexp

@mitu Just installed 2.9.1 and still getting the same result if I leave the gpu overclock.

I'll try to bisect this. Sadly idk which version I had before but was on Stretch so...

mahoneyt944

@triforcexp I think mine was originally 4.6 updated to 4.6.8 if that helps anything.

triforcexp

@mahoneyt944 I'm checking directly over the EmulationStation version.
I went all the way back to 2.7.6 with the same result, so I'm not completely sure the problem is the ES version itself or some other component of the distro.

BTW, I thought that I could try playing around with the GL version and, albeit it didn't fix, I believe the RetroPie script is setting the GLES 1.0 define wrongly, and hence would always use GLES2 (?)

See https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/064a1818ead9dce730ecf928f27860edddc8e745/es-core/src/renderers/Renderer_GLES10.cpp#L1

and

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/0212b0249c96b5b355c1d180f24cff1ae9937518/scriptmodules/supplementary/emulationstation.sh#L168

triforcexp

@mahoneyt944 I just went all the way down to 450 mhz with the same result, maybe staying alive just a bit longer.

mitu

@triforcexp said in Emulation station freezing:

BTW, I thought that I could try playing around with the GL version and, albeit it didn't fix, I believe the RetroPie script is setting the GLES 1.0 define wrongly, and hence would always use GLES2 (?)

You're confusing the CMake's option (USE_GLES1) with the C++ macro with a similar name. EmulationStation didn't have a GLES2 renderer until version 2.9.1 and it's specifically disabled on VC4 because of the poor performance.

Can you post the config.txt you have ? What version of kernel/firmware do you have ?

triforcexp

@mitu Yeah you are right. I would have named both the same though 😅

So here is my config.txt

disable_overscan=1
overscan_left=0
overscan_right=0
overscan_top=0
overscan_bottom=0
hdmi_mode=4

arm_freq=1300
dtparam=audio=on
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=6

gpu_mem=256 
gpu_freq=500 
v3d_freq=525 
usb_hid.mousepoll=0

I've tried removing v3d freq and moving gpu freq down to 450 without success.

dankcushions

@triforcexp said in Emulation station freezing:

sdram_freq=500

this caused my pi3 to be very unstable. i would remove all overclocks as a matter of course when you find instability. then if you must overclock, gradually introduce them one by one.

triforcexp

@dankcushions yeah but weirdly enough emulationstation is the only thing that freezes. Plus older versions worked just fine. If I leave the gpu freq with the default value works