[PlanetCCRMA] Re: [PlanetCCRMANews] added: new edge kernels for fc2/3

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 18:48, Shayne O'Connor wrote:
> Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> 
> >Hi all... some new kernels and matching alsa packages for both Fedora
> >Core 2 and 3. These kernels are in the "edge" category as they include
> >Ingo Molnar's realtime preemption patch. 
> >
> >As usual a _WARNING_, if you are happy with the current kernel and alsa
> >drivers don't upgrade :-)
>
> there's always the chance to be happier :)

Of course, the grass is always greener somewhere else :-)

> >So... what's included?
> >
> >- 2.6.11-0.3.rdt: base kernel is 2.6.11.5 + realtime preempt 0.7.40-04
> >- alsa packages based on 1.0.9rc1
> [MUNCH]
>
> yep - it all seems cool on the ALSA front (i have an sb live with a live
> drive 2)!

Good to know, I could not test this as I don't have one of those. 

> >As usual, feedback is welcome...
>
> well, it all went without a hitch ... was expecting some trouble with
> binary NVIDIA driver, but i just booted into the new kernel (without X
> started) and installed the NVIDIA driver with the -K option ... not
> broken with kernel update, thank god :)
> 
> as to performance, well, it's at least as good as the previous edge
> kernel ... i've been recording and mixing a new song all morning, and
> the only issues i see are ones that were already there (and seperate, i
> think, to any kernel/alsa upgrade). otherwise, i'm getting solid
> performance  with a frame rate of 512 (could probly go lower, but
> there's not much point at the moment ... )

I don't think latency should be significantly better. I'm hoping that
newer releases will mean less problems in the sense that bugs are being
fixed. Regretfully new bugs are also probably being created :-)

> one thing i've been meaning to ask: i remember a while back, in relation
> to a previous kernel's patches, it was suggested to run jack by setting
> "Priority" to "60" in qjackctl ... i was wondering if this still
> applies, and if not, what is the suggested setting ("0" ?) ?

No, not "0' certainly :-)
You can run this:
  /etc/rc.d/init.d/rtirq status
that will print the priority of the interrupt request handlers, I think
think the second down from the top should be your soundcard (check to
see which interrupt it is using by doing "cat /proc/interrupts/"). I
think the best option would be to use a slightly lower priority than
that (so that first to run is the interrupt handler and then jack). 60
should be close. 

> something else i've noticed since about 2.6.10 is one of the first
> messages printed when booting into a kernel ... something like "warning
> - VIA: Padlock not detected" ... i'm guessing these kernels were built
> on your laptop or something, and that this message is not important?

I don't know what the message means. Probably some feature of the
hardware that is not there. I build in a chroot environment so it is or
should be very hardware agnostic. From a quick googling around it looks
like it is a cryptographic hardware engine. 

-- Fernando