[mythtv-users] What hardware do I need to be able to dual record using Comcast cable?

[Greg Woods]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 17:44 -0400, Fred Squires wrote:

> 
> Are you saying you had problems with 64-bit chips or a 64-bit OS.

To be honest, I don't know for sure, but I would presume it's really the
OS, simply because the 64-bit chips have not been around as long.

As an example, when we moved from CentOS on a 32-bit chip to CentOS on a
64-bit chip, same software, we started getting mysterious segfaults in
any daemon process that uses encryption. Two of these (freeradius, and
otpd which is a back-end to radius that calculates one-time passwords)
were local add-ons, so I would have been inclined to blame bugs in this
software, except that sshd also segfaults occasionally, and there are
reports on the CentOS Bugzilla about scp segfaulting. This never
happened on our 32-bit system.

>From the point of view of the sysadmin, I really don't care if it's the
OS or the chip, other than that if it's the OS, this sort of problem
could eventually be fixed. Except that the CentOS bug report is more
than a year old and the problem persists (probably because it is hard to
reproduce and therefore hard to fix). 

This is just an example; I realize this particular issue probably
wouldn't affect Myth.

I have not tried running an OS written for a 32-bit chip on a 64-bit
chip, but even if this worked, it seems to me that I would be
sacrificing some of the chip's performance to do this, and since the
whole idea of moving to a 64-bit chip is to get better performance, this
strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sounds like I
would have to make a tradeoff between stability and performance, and I'd
really rather not have that on my Myth system. Thus my desire to avoid
going to a 64-bit chip.

It sounds to me like the best route might be a dual core 32-bit chip,
assuming there is one fast enough to play back the recordings made from
an HD-PVR.

--Greg