[PlanetCCRMA] Fedora 10 + CCRMA + FFADO RC1 = Happiness

[Mike Mazarick]

Chris Nutt writes:
> I used the following kit (for those who have been discussing what kit 
> works well on the ffado lists):

- Lenovo Thinkpad Z61p (this has a fast disk and TI chipset 1394 
(firewire) on board)
- Focusrite Saffire Pro 26IO Firewire Audio Interface (I love the 
preamps on this unit - and the company are Linux friendly - magic)
- Presonus Digimax FS

> This set up was very quick to get up and running and gave me no problems 
> at all. Install Fed10 - add CCRMA - add FFADO (from CCRMA repos) Great
work!

Great!!   Thanks for letting us know about this...

It shows that I am really not keeping up as well as I should.
The main thing I've picked up is that Firewire is often a problem with
Linux.

If you were getting a new Firewire port, would you go with 400 or 800 bps?
How did you get your firewire port to work?   Anything special or difficult?

One last question that bleeds over into another thread...

I've been paying some attention to the difficulty with getting a working RT
kernel with midi
As a result, I've stuck most recently with FC8 and kernel
2.6.24.7-1.rt3.2.fc8.ccrma-rt-x86_64.

However, currently I am running a more recent kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8 (no rt
and no ccrma) and it seems to be running ok (but not serious stress test).

This leads to two questions:
1.   Is it time to take the plunge into FC10 (which I was avoiding until the
bugs got worked out)?
2.   I am like many others and will want to use a RT kernel just because
that's what you always had in the past.
	What is the best way to make sure you are using RT, and how do you
tell it's there?  
	For instance, I still use qjackctl to turn on Jack, RealTime is
still selected in the setup, and the RT light still blinks in the control
panel even though I'm not using a RT kernel.   It gets even more dicey (much
like the devices listed above) because the device driver for the particular
hardware I'm using is not in the support list or included in the Alsa tree.
It is currently installed 'out of band' by hand.   I am never sure if I am
getting RT or not.   I surely don't know how to confirm that it is being
used or not.  Last time I looked, this question led to a very complicated
path of PCI interrupts and similar 'difficult to figure out and diagnose'
scenarios.

(here's what I was reading last time I looked)
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/hardware-stability-p2.xml

  It would be wonderful to have some simple thing like a visual indicator
that said 'RT-on' or 'RT-off' or 'RT-in use'.

-Mike Mazarick