On Wed, October 3, 2007 9:39 pm, Gus Wirth wrote: > Lan Barnes wrote: > [snip] >> So if I have this box with a VIA chipset (and I'll take your word for it >> that VIA is a POS), and it runs FC 4 just fine _but_ Myth on FC4 on this >> box has found a number of creative ways to choke and lock up, why am I >> not >> justified in saying that Myth has a way to go before it's production >> ready? Because taken to its logical extreme, you're saying that if Myth >> works fine on your machine, then my machine must be bad, which is a >> variation of the old developer's mantra, "it works on _my_ machine." >> >> Sorry. Myth has a way to go. >> > > You don't seem to understand that there is a limit to the extent that > software can make up for bad hardware. The problem is not Myth, it's not > the kernel, and it's not Linux. When you turn over control of the > hardware to some other piece of hardware without software intervention > (which is what DMA does), there is no way to fix it. > > The PVR-150 video capture card that you use requires DMA to work, even > though the actual data rates don't need it, and there is no way to turn > it off. DMA is mediated by hardware in the chipset. If the DMA transfers > are faulty because of bad hardware, then bad things are going to happen. > > You have symptoms of other bad things happening that you are also > ignoring that are also related to the DMA issue, namely the filesystem > corruption. The hard drive is operating in DMA mode. Faults with the DMA > controller will cause data corruption because data goes directly to/from > the drive into/out of memory via the DMA controller, bypassing software > controls.
Well if you're going to _explain_ it, ... damn, that's just cheating to win an argument! Hmm ... it's "good enough" for us to survive for a while. Then a MB upgrade might be possible. It would be nice to move the memory over. I'll ask first. HW is not my area. > > And I think you meant MythDora 4 which is based on Fedora Core 6, not > Fedora Core 4 which is now quite old. > > Gus > > You got all that right. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
