[lwip-users] Windows 7 Startup crashes LwIP and Free RTOS

[Marco Jakobs]

Hi all,

i have noticed a really strange effect here. On my "home control project" i actually have 4 devices with Free RTOS and LwIP 1.31 running. They are communicating together over a Ethernet Switch, which is also connected to my home network. The system is running 24/7 in a test here on my desk, did it weeks without problems.

Suddenly, 3 weeks ago i saw reboots of some devices in their protocol logs (i worked not on the firmware at this time, so no change appeared to the system). These reboots were happening sometimes on a single device, but also on more than one device at the same time. The strange was: It never appeared when i was away from home.

Counting one and one together, it really started after i teared my PCs down and made a new setup with Windows 7 (instead of XP). Next, in most cases the restarts occured when i've switched on my computer (in startup phase), in rare cases when it is running, but never when it is off.

Today i noticed a reset of all 4 devices exactly at the same time (the RTC's of the devices are synchronized). My Watchdog reports me a complete crash of >80% of the tasks, so something teared down the whole RTOS. It was no power problem, it was a software crash. As the devices are completely independent, the exact parrallel crash points again to "something from outside". Of course my PC was running.

There seems to be something caused by WIN7 over the ethernet spread to all devices (Broadcast, Multicast), maybe putting LwIP in an indefinite loop (it has a higher task priority in Free RTOS here, so in this case it may stop lower priority tasks from operating, causing the SW watchdog failure). As my watchdog task has the highest priority of all task and this task did never crash, it may be an argument for that.

Sorry that i have no more information at this time, but i just want to point to this and ask in the round if anybody has seen something like this here. I may put my notebook here to the debug port of one of the devices to maybe catch some more information (i.e. an assert message) when this happens to get closer on this.

Any ideas or "you have to try" 's are highly welcome.

Kind regards
Marco