[mythtv-users] PREEMPT kernel with nvidia

[Paul Andreassen]

On Wednesday 02 January 2008 14:56, Chris Isip wrote:
> On Jan 1, 2008 8:30 AM, Paul Andreassen <paulx at andreassen.com.au> wrote:
> > Is it possible to have a PREEMPT kernel while using the closed source
> > nVidia
> > driver?
> >
> > I've compiled the stable Debian kernel 2.6.18 and the backported kernel
> > 2.6.22, and both kill random programs. Its strange because it some times
> > kills the game I'm running, sometime faults on boot up and once gcc
> > actually
> > died.
>
> What benefit does a preempt kernel have over a regular kernel? I thought it
> was important on a desktop system but not a server since user
> responsiveness is not important on a server.   So I disabled it on the
> kernel config.  I could be wrong.

The idea of a preempt kernel is to reduce the time to respond to interrupts, 
etc at the cost of amount of work done.  Good for games, mythfrontend, etc 
where timing is important.

> As far as the kernel killing things.  I encountered this with only one
> program mysqld.  I think it was the kernel OOM killer. I notice that mysqld
> keeps eating memory the longer it runs so now I restart it everyday.  Have
> you checked the available memory with free when it starts killing things?

The machine has got 3 Giga Bytes of RAM and the problem once occurred on boot 
up.

Thanks,
Paul