[mythtv-users] does setpci latency_timer fail on some mobos?

Craig Huff huffcs at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 4 10:01:13 UTC 2007


I had seen notes on the list about latency and Mark's question finally got me curious enough to look into it, so I found the wiki page about latency.

Now I suspect unadjusted latency may be the reason I've been getting IOBOUND errors, seeing buffer overflow messages in /var/log/messages, etc.

Unfortunately, it seems I'm in the same boat as Mark!

I have an Asus A8N-SLI Premium mobo with three built-in ATA controllers -- 1 PATA, 2 SATA -- and all three (and another device that escapes me right now) won't change latencies.  They are all stuck at zero (0) !!!

I did verify that I was doing the commands right by changing the latency on one of my PVR cards (from 64 to 0x64=100) and back.  In the process I learned that the value setpci takes is assumed hex and the value displayed by lspci is decimal ;-).

Seems that Asus mobos have a common thread.  It is as though they put the PCI parameters for built-in devices in ROM and we're stuck with whatever they chose.  In my case, they appear to be the worst possible values for disk controllers -- at least that is what it seems like to me.

Sigh... And I switched my whole system to this mobo because of a misunderstanding with the difference between APM and ACPI alarm settings.  I may have to go back to my old one and see if it works better.  A lot of work to do that, but if I can't find another way to handle the load of three simultaneous Hauppauge PVR-x50 recording streams, mythcommflag streams from previous recording(s), and potentially a mythburn job, I may compel myself to build a mythtv system from scratch again (third time!).


Any advice welcome.

Craig




 
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