[PlanetCCRMA] Kernel status

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 12:40 -0600, Pablo wrote:
> Sorry if I'm completely unaware of some development, but I'd like to 
> ask about what's keeping the whole series of the later Fedora kernels 
> at the "experimental" stage? 

You mean in the "edge" repository?

> Is this due to something in the 2.6 kernel versions? The Molnar patches?

Many things. One is that Ingo's patches are not bullet proof in all
hardware and are changing fast. I'm currently waiting for newer versions
of the patch for 2.6.15.x (the latest don't work for me with jack) and
have not seen anything for a while, maybe Ingo is on vacation, or is
working hard on other stuff. I have been terribly busy so I have not
been able to follow up on this either - or read Ingo's posts in lkml. 

Another reason is that I'm not confident enough to potentially break
machines when people upgrade to new kernels without reading the fine
print first :-) I was thinking recently of changing the approach so that
the planetcore repository is not "on" by default - these days, at least
in fc4 last time I checked, you _can_ run your audio apps under the
standard fc4 kernels (with the proper updated pam), albeit with not so
good latency as with the kernels patched with Ingo's patch. 

> Is there hope that we might have a non-experimental Planet CCRMA kernel 
> for any of the Fedora Core versions anytime soon?

I don't know. I guess it depends on what "experimental" means. 

AFAIK Ingo's patches are still "experimental". 

There are other patch sets that could be tried (Con Kolivas's patches
for desktop interactivity might be interesting to try) but there's only
a limited number of hours in each day and I still need to sleep :-) 

> The latest SMP 
> kernels I've tried behave rather weirdly with my motherboard, and won't 
> recognize the mouse and keyboard correctly even when the non-SMP kernel 
> of the same number will, 

which version of kernel did you try?

> so I haven't even been able to get to the 
> point wher I can try and configure my RME soundcard with ALSA, which 
> continues to be another awful hassle I won't get into here... I'd just 
> like to get a DAW working that I can use to convince my students to try 
> Linux alternatives, but this has proven to be a bit disheartening, even 
> if I don't mind working a bit and learning a bit more than with other 
> OSs!

Same feeling here...

I have had good results with 2.6.14-0.10.rrt.rhfc4.ccrmasmp (in the
"edge" repo), but, for example, in my latest hardware it sometimes fails
to recognize the hard disk or hard disk controller resulting in a panic
when it tries to boot. A reset usually cures it. So I can't deploy it
widely here. The rest of the machines are running
2.6.13-0.3.rdt.rhfc4.ccrmasmp but that's old by now. 

-- Fernando