[mythtv-users] My MythTV journey

Torsten Schenkel torsten.schenkel at web.de
Thu Dec 25 09:34:39 EST 2003


Am Mi, den 24.12.2003 schrieb Joseph A. Caputo um 16:48:
> On Tuesday 23 December 2003 17:07, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> >
> > > * Stay away from nforce boards
> >
> > I disagree. That has to be qualified. Stay away from nForce boards if
> > you aren't experienced and won't be installing Fedora/Red Hat.
> > Otherwise, they work quite well. I patched absolutely nothing to get
> > mine working, first under Red Hat Linux 9, now under Fedora Core.
> 
> Hmmm, what's the state of things for other distros regarding nForce?  
> I'm pretty experienced & have no problem patching, building new 
> kernels, etc.  Is it really a PITA to get all of the stuff nForce needs 
> in other distros (say, Debian/KnoppMyth)?  I'm trying to decide if I 
> want my new box to have an nForce2 board, and I'll want to pick an 
> appropriate distro to go with it.  I was hoping to migrate away from 
> RH/Fedora as I wanted to try an apt-based distro.

It only is a PITA if you don't know what the problem is:

The problem comes up with heavy DMA traffic, so you suspect all things,
like NIC, RAID controller or framegrabbers. After you changed all those
parts and still didn't find the problem, you change the board. Then the
error is still there and you are getting a bit nervous, since there's a
deadline for the new machine. Finally you stumble over a thread on the
kernel mailing list and find you are not alone. You find the hint about
APIC, but none of the boot time options help. Finally you grep the
kernel config file and find the options for local APIC and disable it.
You recompile a kernel and install it. Again you fire up your number
crunching application and scp lots of file over the NIC at full speed.
You won't believe how interesting a top and ping can be, you'll watch it
for at least half an hour. You go out for a midnight snack and hurry to
get back, to see if the machine still lives. It does, after 1 hour and
lots of copied gigabytes .... You still cant believe it ....

This was some months ago with my second NForce2 machine (Same setup as
the first one, which never showed the problem, only difference
Thoroughbred vs. Barton)

Today you know what it is, so all you'll need is a new kernel. And a bit
of patience or a second machine to compile it on, since you can't be
sure the machine survives long enough :-)

Funny enough, I never heard of installation problems. Maybe the debian
install kernels have APIC disabled?

Torsten



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