[mythtv-users] Request info from working M10K frontend.

BARKER, Paul paul.barker at orange.co.uk
Wed Apr 20 11:28:40 UTC 2005


>With XvMC and .18 on the frontend only Epia, I am seeing roughly 20% 
>cpu usage, which makes this problem even stranger. About 3% cpu on 
>hardware interrupts, 3% on software interrupts, and 0% wait. That's 
>what's making me think network latency now, and checking out the shared 
>video/ethernet interrupts situation.
>
>Now that I have a disk in there, and no longer need net boot, I'm going 
>to try a nic in the pci, and see if I can get it on a different 
>interrupt that way, just for giggles.

I struggled for about 4 months to get this working. I created a diskless M10K
based on
FC2 and built the unichrome drivers, DRM and everything else. I built Myth
0.17 with XvMC
and had pretty much the same problems. Lots of prebuffering and stuttering on
playback.

I also compiled xine with h/w decoding support and got that working quite
well. I tried
all sorts of stuff to get Myth working correctly including putting dual NICs
in the B/E one
dedicated to the F/E boot and Myth traffic. I rebuilt a minimal boot from
scratch using the
Linux from Scratch resources - same issues. I did network perf tests, bought
a cable tester and
found a couple of dodgy patch cables - still no joy. I put in a hard disk and
found things 
got somewhat better (it would only stutter at startup) but then if I skipped
forward or 
backwards in a stream I had to save the position and stop and restart the
stream as it 
stuttered so badly afterward.

<sigh> My M10K is now back in the back room on my bench. I've reverted to my
physically larger
Athlon XP 1800 + Geforce 4MX frontend in the family room which I rebuilt with
FC3 and had up and
running fine in about 4 hours. I'm not as happy with the quality of the video
out as I was with
the Epia's but it has never stuttered once (and that's without any h/w
decoding on). I have tweaked
it with the nvidia-settings tool which has improved it somewhat.

Last night I did a clean Fedora install on the M10K (to a local disk) but I
only got as far as an 
apt-get dist-upgrade before hitting the sack. I was planning to start from
scratch with DRM, 
Unichrome X11, etc testing at every install to try and track down the issue.
I bought the Epia 
specifically for a diskless, small form factor front end and so far it's
caused only grief and 
a total lack of Wife Appreciation whilst I was trying to make it work. :(

BTW - has anyone gotten the new VIA open source Unichrome driver to work with
recent releases ? 
I had a very quick look but the docs in the distribution seemed a bit poor
and I haven't looked at 
them in depth.

I'll post any progess I make so who knows, between us perhaps we can crack it
:)

Cheers

Paul


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