[PlanetCCRMA] [PlanetCCRMANews] more "testing" kernels, bristol

Tracey Hytry shakti at bayarea.net
Mon Oct 20 00:49:36 PDT 2008


More info about kernels on the "Shuttle box"

After posting the last message, and while leaving it in the test mode with fedora's kernel, I went and did a bunch of updates on the machine.  Interestingly, I started to get xruns during the actual updating of the packages.  In a way I could have expected that because of the intense cpu/memory/disk activity then.  I was still running jack at 1.45ms and there were a lot of little xruns.  These xruns were all about .5ms except for two which were about 1.5ms.

Overall, the stock fedora kernel(2.6.26.5-45.fc9.i686) seemed to hold up pretty well on it's own.

Today I tried testing again with - kernel-rt-2.6.26.6-1.rt11.1 (same test as last post(with a soft synth hanging out on jack too)).  At first I tried it at .725ms but got a lot of reports of very small xruns(all much smaller then the test of .725ms latency).  I guess I was asking too much?  So, I went back to 1.45ms and started hydrogen again, set hydrogen playing a demo, and started up WhySynth again.  I then went away from the computer for about 3.5 hours.  When I got back to it there was one very small xrun report(about .25ms if I remember) that happened about 3 hours into the session.

The newest ccrma-rt kernel seems to work ok, better than many of them have been in the past.  I do think I need to get a chance to really test it though.  I'll try to build the nvidia graphics driver for it in the near future and test then also.  I also will have to do this whole thing again on the 64bit fedora9 dual core machine and report that when it happens.

As an aside, the machine I did the testing on is running fedora9 32 bit.  It's also running kde which I found to be more stable then gnome at first.  A few months back with the original kernels(and a few afterwards), when there was a lot of video problems(especially on the 64 bit version), I did a lot of fine tuning on both machines to get around those problems.  Most of the stuff I did was turn off a lot of the excess garbage that was installed and turned on by fedora(no different then most other distros btw).  I do wonder if some of the problems people are having is because of the extras that aren't really needed for doing music.  Maybe we need to pass around some info about how to tune the new fedora's?

Latter.



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