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I've had a single box system in use as my main TV working solidly for well over a year now but i've just applied some system updates in Ubuntu and its well and truly killed TVheadend. Really not sure if this is a problem with Kodi, TVH addon for kodi or general system issues with the tv card. Any pointers greatly appreciated and apologies in advance if it does stray strictly from Kodi issues.

Current setup:
Ubuntu - 14.04 64bit
TVheadend - 4.1.101
Kodi 15 RC
TV Card TBS6281 running official 15.05.25 driver

General system update took place which included Kodi updating to latest RC version and the TVH addon updating to kodi-pvr-hts 2.1.16 along with the linux headers and a whole heap of other rubbish that was probably not needed. I'll try and include the complete update log at the bottom to show what else was affected.

All installed fine and TV worked. I rebooted the box an hour or so later and Kodi reported no free tv adapters when I tried the tv. TVheadend it no longer shows my two adapters (TBS6281 is a dual card). I can't seem to get them back for love or money. I've a sneaking feeling this is something more system wide than a Kodi problem and something has killed the driver modules. I've spent the best part of two hours trying both the official drivers and the open source ones for the TBS card with no luck. (When I first installed the card I had similar problems and the opensource driver would never work).

Hitting desperation i've gone through the update log and tried removing any packages that I assumed may have caused the problem and putting them back to previous versions with no luck.

Update.log

I'd look to dmesg to see what's going on as you boot, as it sounds like the adapters aren't initialised and hence can't be found. "dmseg | grep dvb" would be a start - there may be something in /var/log/syslog as well, but it's likely to be the same.

I think you're on the right lines with the driver, as you have a kernel update in there which would have killed off any proprietary TBS binary drivers unless you have a dkms job to rebuild them. That doesn't explain why you've not been able to re-install them, of course, on either closed or open source...

The easiest test is to reboot to your previous kernel (you do still have it, don't you?) and see what happens.

You'll have to reinstall the TBS driver every time the kernel is updated. Just follow the instructions again, reboot, and it should all be fine.

(2015-07-21, 10:28)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]I think you're on the right lines with the driver, as you have a kernel update in there which would have killed off any proprietary TBS binary drivers unless you have a dkms job to rebuild them. That doesn't explain why you've not been able to re-install them, of course, on either closed or open source...

(2015-07-21, 13:06)negge Wrote: [ -> ]You'll have to reinstall the TBS driver every time the kernel is updated. Just follow the instructions again, reboot, and it should all be fine.

Thanks for the pointers. Indeed its definitely a case of the kernel killing the driver. However, doesn't seem as simple as that and I know I've never had to reinstall it before when i've updated the kernel (or is it a case of only during a major version change)? Nevermind, the official driver is falling over at the make stage looking for the wrong kernel stating its building for generic 3.13.0 and cannot find file in lib/modules/3.13.0-58-generic/kernel/drivers even though I am now running 3.19 as confirmed by uname -r

I've read several posts stating that old modules can trip up installation and you should clear out the ones causing problems or go OTT and run 'sudo rm -rf /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/*' to kill them all. Still no luck.

However, I tried once more with the open source driver and everything installed fine on the 3.19 kernel. Adapters are now showing in TVheadend but still can't get it to work. Network scan fails and on closer inspection it seems I cannot open the adapters. I've tried in tvheadend and VLC. It seems there is some weird permissions thing going on perhaps even though the user has permissions to access the video group.

This is giving me throw back nightmares to when I first built a HTPC. I originally went down the MythTV route and could never get it going with the front end stating the adapters were in use by some other program and couldn't be opened. Its why I gave up on myth totally and went the tvh route.

I gave up on the open source drivers.

Delete your TBS driver directory completely, download it again and follow the instructions. That thing is a mess and it's easy to get it wrong if you try to repeat something without starting over from the beginning.

The reason you haven't had to bother with this before is most likely as you said, a normal Ubuntu release only comes with security fixes for the kernel, no new versions. As soon as the version changes, any manually compiled drivers will need to be recompiled.