[PlanetCCRMA] System slowing down with Ardour FC4/edge-kernel (softirq-tasklet)

[Tracey Hytry]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:46:40 +0200
chromdildo <chromdildo@t-online.de> wrote:

> Whats the matter? On FC3 everything was ok. btw. installed a new nVidia
> FX5200 (Dualhead/Xinerama).
> Got something todo with it?

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it;  all I can say is I'll pass on some more of my experiences.  This happened all with FC3:

I'm not very trusting of the nvidia drivers, especially on top of these kernels.  I feel like we're taking them to places they were never designed for.

I was using an FX5200 with the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7167 drivers before.  When I tried to upgrade the drivers I had trouble trying to get Xwindows to work in 1920x1200 mode on a DFP;  so I had to stick to the 1.0-7167 version.  It seemed that the newer version of the drivers couldn't comprehend what I told the earlier one to do.

We also had a couple of what apeared to be lockups on another machine here with the same edge kernel, same nvidia driver, but different card.  It turned out it was the driver doing loops and other things, consuming most of the cpu.  Somewhere I think I read that these drivers may not be built for this kind of schedualing.

As an aside, whenever X starts, the nvidia driver resets the pci latency timer to the maximum value.  This overides any setup I tell the machine to do during boot.  Until I can figure out where in the X startup proccess to change it back;  I run this from a term after X starts:

#######################################################

#!/bin/sh
#
# used to reset latency timers to 64
# after the nvidia driver rudely sets itself to 248
# when xwindows is started

setpci -v -d *:* latency_timer=40

#######################################################

We found that setting everything from the normal 32 to 64 worked pretty well for us.

Tracey