[gentoo-amd64] Re: kernel.org vs. Gentoo-64 bit kernels (xruns)

[Duncan]

Mark Knecht posted <5bdc1c8b05091914554f0c7360@××××××××××.com>, excerpted
below,  on Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:55:59 -0700:

> It seems right now that a simple emerge sync is causing xruns on this
> system implying to me some underlying problem with either hard drive
> activity or networking. since the hard drive is SATA and the networking
> option in the kernel marks the NIC driver as 'Reverse engineered -
> experimental' I'm not confident of fixing this problem in the immediate
> short term anyway.
>
> My thoughts right now:
>
> 1) kernel.org + rt patches
> 2) ck-sources
> 3) gentoo-sources-amd64 + rt patches not cleanly applied
>
>    I may also investigate a different NIC. I have a email friend that
> runs a studio in Sydney. I helped him move from FC2 to Gentoo. We had
> xruns using some of the NIC stuff for his motherboard. When we found that
> was the problem he never had another problem.

I'm not familiar with the term "xrun", so this may be entirely off the
wall, but have you confirmed the hard drive is running DMA?  If your
chipset or SATA drivers are wrong, and your hard drive is having to run in
legacy interrupt mode instead of DMA mode, it *WILL* destroy latency and
generally make the system unusable for any sort of real-time work at all,
regardless of the other kernel patches applied.  So... in addition to
checking the network drivers, investigate the hard drive and chipset I/O
drivers as well, and confirm you ARE running DMA mode.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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