[PlanetCCRMA] Planetedge Q3

[Matt Barber]

Hi,

I thought some of my experiences with the Q3 planetedge kernel might be
helpful.

We built a new dual-opteron box with sata (silicon image controller and
western digital drives).  Fedora installation was very smooth.  After
that, though things got a little rough.  We first tried x86_64 fedora,
but I wasn't able to rebuild the ccrma kernel for x86_64 architecture (I
didn't try that hard, as I was going to wait until x86_64 becomes more
of a factor, and Fernando has some 64-bit ccrma kernels).... anyway, so
after the second installation, I installed both the P9 and the Q3
2.6.8.1 kernels, neither of which were able to find the sata drives. I
wasn't sure the initrd was doing its job loading the modules, so I tried
compiling sata support for the sata controller into the kernel, which
for some reason didn't work either.  My final solution (though not quite
kosher) was to hold on to the sata_sil module from a normal rebuild,
rebuild with sata support in the kernel, install and then copy the
module into the /lib/modules directory for that kernel, and then run
mkinitrd (leaving the sata line in modprobe.conf) so that the module was
part of the ramdisk.  This seems to have worked, as I can now boot with
ease.  Overall, the system seems to work better with acpi off, and I'm
not sure how apic irqs work, but the delta 1010 we were using was
putting itself on irq 27 until I added noapic to the kernel arguments.

Jack, once it is up and running, seems to do amazingly well (using jack
by itself doesn't produce the hard system locks people have described
with smp systems).  However, some things (like cdrdao) seem completely
incompatible with the realcap module.  If I start burning a cd with
realcap on, it locks the system... cd burning doesn't work with acpi,
either.  So far it is possible to burn using sudo (error messages
without sudo - a 2.6.8* thing?), and I'm curious whether it is sudo jobs
that react badly with realcap rather than cd burning... I should test
that more.  I also have not tried k3b yet.  When is the newest ccrma
kernel scheduled to come out (no pressure at all, but I need to know
whether I should try to get things working on this one if the newest one
has some potential fixes in it, since we are of course itching to get
this box up, and I could save time rebuilding and tinkering if there is
a fix for some of these problems in the newest kernel)...

One other annoying thing, that I suspect is related to the nvidia
driver, is that when I log out of gnome, it sometimes freezes x, so that
I have to ctrl-alt-backspace to get where I can sign in again.  Does
this happen to anyone?

Thanks for everything - I'm really pleased by the progress in 2.6.

Matt