[mythtv-users] Yet another hardware list

[Jan Ophey]

Peter Schachte wrote:

>As I understand it, that part will not support cool n quiet operation.
>I believe you have to go up to a 3000+ to get that.  Cool n quiet,
>with the kernel's cqu frequency scaling enabled, slows the clock when
>the cpu load is low, saving power and heat, and allowing your cpu fan
>to slow down.  I've got an Athlon 64 3000+ and have frequency scaling
>working very well.  The lowest clock speed supported seems to be 1
>GHz, though.  I wish I could slow it even further for the times when
>nothing's happening and the machine is just acting as a file server.
>  
>

I don't know if it is a well know problem or problem many people have, 
but on my AMD64 system with a PVR350 recordings & live-tv show 
stutters,audio glitches and mpeg-artifacts if I enable 
cpu-frequency-scaling.
I swapped the PVR throug various slots making sure it has its own IRQ.
I also tested playing the mpeg2-stream directly with mplayer via 
"mplaver /dev/video0" giving me same audio glitches & artifacts, but no 
stutters.
A file recorded through "dd if=/dev/video0 of=/tmp/test.mpg bs=1M 
count=20" also has glitches & artifacts.
I had in mind that it might have to deal with freq-scaling, as the only 
thing I did was setup the freq-sacling before these issues startet.
If this is not a misconfiguration on my side or a problem based on the 
specific hardware combination I use (maybe other AMD64 users can leave 
some sentences here), I suggest not to use freq-scaling in combination 
with Mythtv.
FWIW, here my system specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon64 3200+
MB: Asus A8N-SLI
RAM: Kingston Value-Ram (2*512MB in dualchannel mode)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 6600GT PCI-Express
TV: Hauppauge WinTV PVR350
HDDs: 1x 80GB Maxtor IDE containing my System (good for making scrambled 
eggs on, if not cooled ;) ), 1x 160GB Samsung containing my /home + 
myth-partition for ringbuffer and recordings.

Gentoo Linux running on Kernel 2.6.11-gentoo-r9, baked with genkernel 
--menuconfig, modified to include modules only for hardware I have in 
the machine + "preemptible kernel" option selected.
ivtv svn version 2889 (had problems with 0.3.9 too)

Jan