I have the following system config: nforce 780i SLI Motherboard PVR-250 card Fedora 8 with all updates.
I had a real struggle getting this card to work in a stable way. I was wanting to get some other peoples thoughts on this. I have had this card for a long time, just so you know. First I started out with Fedora 7 all updates applied. The card gave me multiple errors including the dread DMA timeouts. The others were when watching TV on it, I would get the buffer's full errors, and application not reading fast enough, blah, blah, blah. Video play back quality was not very good to say the least. Finally, upgrade to Fedora 8 which yum updates install kernel version 2.6.24.4-64.fc8. One set of problems went away. The video play back looked great no longer getting the buffer full errors. However, the DMA timeouts remained, usually occurring fairly quickly within around 10 mins or so. Went through all the how to's and troubleshooting, and finally started playing with the pci latency settings. Through MUCH trail and error I finally am using the following settings: In the bios I have the default set to 176 for the pci latency. In my rc.local startup I am using the following setting: /sbin/setpci -v -s 05:09.0 latency_timer=80 Obviously the default of 64 never worked here. And the bios default was the standard 32. The only PCI card in the system is the PVR-250. And according to the lspci output the only pci device listed with the latency of 176 is the intergrated firewire adapter. All other intergrated devices I am fairly certain are PCI-Express. So the question is why did I even have this problem? Also is there not a better way to troubleshoot pci-latency other than by trail and error? Is it possible that the default of 64 is still a little low? I am tempted to try a setting of latency_timer=60 just to test it. But I am kinda tired of messing with it for now. I spent almost two days on this. _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
