[mythtv-users] linux updates suck

[aaron]

On 9/8/07, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>
> I was thinking of just those items, IVTV and the nVidia drivers, as well
> as the Go7007 drivers for the Plextor devices and some of the DVB stuff.

Heh, of course :)  A few months ago, I tried upgrading to the highest
IVTV version that's supposed to still support 2.4, and broke
everything. Took me a while to get things back to a working state. It
really reminded me that I need to buy a new TV; trying to read console
text was painful.

>
> Also, support for some of the more exotic filesystems is far better in
> the recent kernels, as is the USB/FW subsystem support.
>
> The scheduling and VM systems are purported to be better as well.

Makes sense. I use XFS here, never had any problems with it. I
switched wholesale to XFS way back when SGI made their first "usable"
code drop. Hours of fun trying to patch into the kernel trees... ;-)
I don't actually use any USB devices on my PVR; my IR receiver is
serial (yeah!) and I don't have a Firewire at all.

>
> I haven't actually tried some of the above-mentioned stuff on 2.4
> kernels, but it seems to be the "conventional wisdom" that what I said
> is true. I'd certainly welcome any empirical data that supports or
> contradicts my information.

I use 2.6 on my desktop (which is slower than my PVR... how sad is
that? :D ) and it does tend to *feel* slower than 2.4 did. I'm not
sure how much of it to attribute to my lack of tuning skill, and how
much to changes in the scheduler and VM. In earlier 2.6 it tended to
page like crazy, I remember that...

>
> If it's working, leave it alone :-)

Definitely... although the machine's over three years old now, so I'm
starting to think a bit about what to do when the harddrives
eventually fail. I'll probably take that opportunity to rebuild it
with a more up-to-date Slackware release (I think I have 9.2 on there
now), which will them move me up to 2.6. I'm hoping I'll be able to
keep using Bootsplash, which was one of the reasons I've stayed on
2.4; last time I tried, Bootsplash didn't work on the 2.6 kernels I
wanted to use.


-- 
aaron

"Oh oh oh. I'm incoherent with excitement. Please tell me what fascinating
bit of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia you will assail me with next."
        -- Arthur Dent