I am at a loss trying to describe this problem as I can't really offer much detail. Essentially what happens is, after freshly reloading the lirc_i2c driver with modprobe, I can only access /dev/lirc once. Reloading lets me use access it again, but only once. For example: cat /dev/lirc (misc stuff appears when I press buttons on remote) ctrl-c to exit cat /dev/lirc (a second time) (button presses show nothing) or something like (with lircd running) mplayer test.avi (button presses fast forward/rewind movie etc) mplayer test2.avi (button presses do nothing) I downgraded to the older lirc patch from genpatches-2.6-4.27 and after a little modification to get it to apply, all works fine. Apparently something in the new patch has broken lirc_i2c. I am using a hauppauge wintv radio card.
Not sure if this is relevant but from the news on http://flameeyes.dap.ro/ it says "Problems with 2.6.3 patch (22-03-04 @ 23:58:52 ) For who is reporting problems with lirc_i2c and the patch 2.6.3, use without problems the 2.6.4 version, which applies cleanly also over 2.6.3 vanilla kernels. This fixes the errors with lirc_i2c module." Could be relevant to this, I am going to try out the newer patch and see.
Tried the patch for 2.6.4 and the problem still persisted.
The proper fix for this is to get these drivers in to the main kernel tree, that will solve all of these lirc build issues... Any reason why the developers of this driver have not submitted them to the main kernel tree? I can't seem to connect to their web site, but if you want to let them know that I will work with them to get their code into the main tree if they want to, please do.
I have absolutely no idea why the drivers aren't in the official tree and agree that they should be. The site appears to be down and when it's up it's quite slow so I'm not sure what the deal is.
To add to the discussion, setting up a MythTV media box right now with a Hauppauge PVR-350 in it. I also get the same "only works once" issue, ie: irw will get codes from the remote, but stops after that one session. Additional irw commands won't get the codes. Additional issue: When lirc_i2c is loaded as a module, the computer will not reboot or shutdown. The root cause is a kernel oops occurring during the Unload Modules phase of the shutdown sequence. Attempting to rmmod the module directly results in an oops, and a hang during shutdown at the Unload Modules step.
I will learn to test every variation before putting foot in mouth. Please disregard my attempted link between lirc_i2c and shutdown hang. After removing other modules while leaving lirc_i2c, the system shuts down. I am having some sort of module related hang, but I can't blame lirc_i2c. I do get a kernel oops on attempting to rmmod lirc_i2c, it just seems unrelated. Please pardon my snafu.
Created attachment 29379 [details, diff] modified older patch Here's the patch from 2.6.4 that I modified to work with 2.6.5 if anyone wants it. I just rebuild the tarball with that in it instead of the newer patch and then re-digest. Everything seems to work fine with that. Also, flameeyes' page is back up but it's very slow and parts seem to be down. I will try later I guess.
As the lirc developers are not answering my queries, I'm going to seriously consider removing this patch from the gentoo kernel, and just make it a stand alone package that users can add if they want it. I really suggest that all lirc users pressure the developers of the kernel code to submit it upstream into the main kernel tree, which will solve all of these problems.
Flameeyes moved his site back to http://flameeyes.web.ctonet.it/ in a somewhat recent news post he wrote: "LIRC Patches are now unsupported: official LIRC packages are adding 2.6 kernels support in 0.7.0preX packages, and for many people the ir-kbd-{gpio|i2c} from Gerd Knorr (bttv author) is enough. I'm working to adding support for KWorld card in the ir-kbd-gpio driver." So maybe just doing emerge lirc will work like it used to with 2.4 on 2.6 once the official lirc packages are working well enough. In my case, I think ir-kbd-i2c may be what I need (as my remote is from my tv card.) So I might not even need this patch, or drivers from lirc at all.
ok, lirc patches are removed from the gentoo-dev-sources package, so this can't be a bug anymore :)