TBSDTV Community Forum

Tuner: TBS6981
OS: Slackware64 14.0
Kernel: 3.2.45 x86_64
Driver: v130506

I can't seem to get the TBS6981 working in Slackware64. The drivers appear to build OK, but during boot the frontend initialisation fails. I have two TBS cards in this system at the same time: TBS6981 and TBS6280. The 6280 works fine but the 6981 fails to start. This problem still happens if I remove the TBS6280 and perform the steps below.

Slackware was installed onto a freshly formatted HDD, with all packages selected during install. A full update was run via "slackpkg upgrade-all".

Then:
wget http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/document ... 130506.zip
unzip tbs-linux-drivers_v130506.zip
tar -jxf linux-tbs-drivers.tar.bz2
cd linux-tbs-drivers
./v4l/tbs-x86_64.sh
make && make install
init 6

At this point I captured the attached dmesg and lcpci outputs.

Any help is much appreciated.

Edit: Can't seem to attach files, and I can't put them into a code box because they exceed the max character limit.

Pastebin.com is your friend

Thanks!

dmesg: http://pastebin.com/XLmv7k4i

lspci: http://pastebin.com/S1vW9UEx

You've still got some of your old modules installed. They are messing with the new ones.

You'll find posts on here referring to what I'm taking about. Simply delete the old media kernel modules folder and reinstall then reboot.

UDL

sorry was on my phone earlier.

sudo rm -R /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/media
sudo make install
sudo reboot

UDL

Hi again and thanks for your suggestion UDL. I was just about to try it when I noticed an email from TBS support, and it's definately a module problem.

Support suggested that I do:
rmmod cx23885
modprobe tbs6981fe
modprobe tbsfe
modprobe cx23885

Which worked! No error messages and the DVB-S2 adapters suddenly appeared as adapters 2 & 3 in /dev/dvb. One workaround is to add these commands to /etc/rc.d/rc.local so they run at the end of the boot scripts, which I may try if all else fails. In the meantime I'll look into other ways of re-ordering the modules loading.

Is it possible that removing the old kernel modules as per your suggestion will rectify the load order?

Update:

I tried removing the media directory and rebuilding as suggested but it didn't help.

I have found a file called /lib/modules/<kernel>/modules.dep which lists all the modules and their dependencies. cx23885 is in there, but tbs6981fe and tbsfe are not listed as dependencies. I am tempted to edit this file manually, but it is auto-generated from the depmod command. My next job is to find out where depmod gets its information and try to add tbs6981fe and tbsfe to cx23885.

Update 2:

I have found that depmod quizzes the modules themselves for their dependencies. I think this means that either the module is not reporting its dependencies correctly (unlikely) or that this version of depmod has a bug (more likely).

For the meantime I will stick with a startup script to load the modules, but if I come across a fix I will post it here.