[mythtv] High load average, low CPU with Unichrome

[martin north]

i'm running v0.17 on EPIA-M6000 (gentoo, 2.6.9) with Unichrome v29. I'm 
seeing a healthy CPU load of about 40% but a high Load Average of between 
1.5-2.0 during Live TV. This is the case with and without bob-deinterlacing. 

I didn't see this behaviour with the old libddmpeg, although i was running 
2.4.24 and Xfree at the time so a lot has changed since then.. 

my setup is: M6000, gentoo 2.6.9, DRM 2.0, xorg, Unichrome v29 (and 
unichrome 3d), DVB-T card. Here is what 'top' says (i guess i could do with 
512M memory!) 

top - 14:14:52 up 49 min,  2 users,  load average: 1.82, 1.64, 1.40
Tasks:  83 total,   2 running,  81 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 30.0% us,  9.2% sy,  0.0% ni, 57.2% id,  1.9% wa,  0.2% hi,  1.6% si
Mem:    224180k total,   223060k used,     1120k free,     8628k buffers
Swap:   500464k total,        0k used,   500464k free,   110144k cached 

..and iostat shows healthy numbers also, so that isn't the problem. I've 
tried AGP appeture sizes of 32M and 128M and that doesn't change anything. 
And the mythfrontend logs show that VLD_XvMC is running ok.. 

# iostat
Linux 2.6.9 (mythtv)    02/14/05 

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle
         30.12    0.00   11.00    1.83   57.05 

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
hda               0.53        61.09         1.83     190444       5720
hdc              15.32       138.39      1025.37     431406    3196370 


Anyone any suggestions as to what the CPU is waiting around for?? Is this 
'normal' unichrome behaviour?? Apologies if this is more relevant to the 
unichrome lists... not sure if this is a myth or unichrome issue. 

cheers
martin