Well, I be damned. I think I fixed it. I disabled DMA on the hard drive and I have not experienced a freeze in about 6-8 hours of recording and watching TV. I have yet to fully test it but this looks like a winner.
I am using the PVR-350 on a Celeron 700 dell. Hardware encoding and decoding with DMA on the Hard drive used NO CPU time to display video (out of one of the rare occurrences where I got a solid stream of video, it was like 12 cpu time seconds out of 30 minutes. With DMA disabled on the hd CPU utilization jumped to about 35%-50% but everything seems to be solid. Streaming, ff rw pause, pounding it with all of the above as fast as humanly possible to push the buttons. Solid. In fact I experienced my first front end crash .. whooh .. err I mean doh. Well at least I'm to the next level. Now. How do I disable DMA permanently on the HD. I can't remember the unix equivilant to the windows runas command. Mythtv account does not have permissions to change hardware. Thanks again for your help. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Freaky Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 10:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ivtv-devel] Most supported distro On Wed, February 2, 2005 15:26, Brent Kilgore said: > I have been trying to get the knoppmyth distro with the PVR350 (tuner 47) > working with no avail. I am down to it working as long as I don't ff or > rw. > Then it freezes with what appears to be DMA deadlock/conflict between the > HD > and the decoder device. If I tickle another device on the system bus > somehow (usually sending a packet through network card) it will > unfreeze..wonder if I disable hd DMA. I'm running 1% cpu usage when > watching > live tv. I should be able to absorb the cpu load. .. worth a try anyway. > Don't hold me to this, but I heared somewhere (I think this list) that some older Via chipset have huge problems with DMA under high system load. > 1: Try the 2.6 kernel which is supposed to handle DMA better. I've got > it > compiled and installed but when I try to boot with it it gives me "inittab > not found". Any easy fixes for this? Dunno > 2: Try another distro. I'm looking at a full Debian install, but knoppix > is based on debian. Will this make a difference? Any other > recommendations? Could be. The kernel is AFAIK however not heavily dependant on libraries or other things. The difference between distro's is therefore much smaller in this problem then it would be in for example a KDE compiling problem. > 3: Build a new computer for it. Right now it's running on a hand me down > 700 celeron dell. I was looking at a barebones AMD XP 1800+ that I found > for > about $150-200. This brings about the question. Can I just take the > linux > system disk from my old and expect it to work in the new system without > reinstall. Does linux have that nasty HAL like windows does? Also, Is > there any specific hardware setups that someone would recommend? I would > like small, quiet, and CHEAP as possible (gamecube sized?) Yes, definitely. The only problem you can have is that the current kernel can't boot, because it's compiled for another processor type, or because it doesn't have support for the IDE controllers on the new system. Other than that, it shouldn't be any problem whatsoever. I restore entire linux systems from back-up by simply setting up the filesystem the way I want, untar the back-up to it, if necessary change /etc/fstab, recompile the kernel and rerun the bootloader. > Is there any motherboards I should avoid like the plague (no I'm not > touching an ECS chipset mobo, they pissed me to much with tech support) AFAIK the current Via and Intel chipsets are very well supported. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IntelliVIEW -- Interactive Reporting Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time by over 75%! Publish reports on the web. Export to DOC, XLS, RTF, etc. Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ivtv-devel ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IntelliVIEW -- Interactive Reporting Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time by over 75%! Publish reports on the web. Export to DOC, XLS, RTF, etc. Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ivtv-devel
