On 12/04/2005, at 3:02 AM, Micah Wedemeyer wrote:
Hi all,
Well, I've finally given up on my Epia frontend/backend. It worked reasonably
well for about 8 months and I got TV and DVD playback to finally work, but it
was a very flaky platform. About a week ago, I was trying to rip a DVD while
watching TV at the same time, and it locked up (DMA bug is my best guess). On
reboot, I found that there was something wrong with the superblock of the XFS
partition where all my recordings were stored.
<snip>
Micah, sorry to hear it's been such a pain. I can only say that this must be specific to particular EPIA mobos since I have a M10K system that's working very well. It certainly wasn't easy to get Myth running, but most of the difficulty came from areas that weren't down to the mobo.
The main issue related to EPIA is that the 2.6.9 kernel that shipped with the FC3 distro uses Longhaul CPU scaling, which was causing frequent system hangs. Moving to stock standard 2.6.10 (no recompile needed) and the system's current uptime is nearly 26 days. The second main issue was that the Myth RPM's didn't have Unichrome XvMC built in, so although TV worked out of the box it was pegging the CPU until I did a recompile (takes 2.5 hours :/). That plus the ALSA stuttering bug in 0.17 cost a lot of time.
I've read of the DMA-related woes that some EPIA boards have, but all I can say is that haven't run into anything like that - I'm often simultaneously hammering the 100Mbps ethernet and the disk and never had a problem. I suspect that at least some of the people who thought they had DMA probs were actually hitting the Longhaul bug, which had a similar symptom: total lockup.
So I guess it's a matter of choosing an EPIA mobo that's proven itself, rather than giving up on the whole platform.
Matt.
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