[mythtv-users] MythTV + OpenMosix

[Marc Barrett]

I've been looking into OpenMosix recently, and it appears to be an interesting project.   I think it would be a perfect companion to MythTV, in a kind of 'MythOS' project.  A lot of people have multi-system MythTV setups, and I am not the exception; myself, I have a MythTV box in my living room with a fast CPU (2.6Ghz P4), lots of RAM, a big HD, and three tuners; and in my bedroom I have a slower slave backend box with only a single tuner connected to my digital cable set-top box.  At least on the surface, it appears that with OpenMosix a person could do load-balancing between systems in a MythTV setup, so that things like transcoding and MySQL database accesses and such could take better advantage of the speed of all of the systems instead of just one system.  Also, nodes can 'plug-in' to a cluster and be used, so that you could drop a fast laptop into a MythTV setup and take advantage of the speed of the laptop immediately for instance.

I have not gotten around to actually making an OpenMosix setup, though, because it appears to have a lot of problems right now.  For one thing, it currently only works with Kernel 2.4.  All of my tuners are Hauppauge tuners, and I don't know how well IVTV works with Kernel 2.4.  Also, OpenMosix right now only handles heavy-weight threads, so some work might have to be done to MythTV to take better advantage of OpenMosix. 

I would just like to hear if anyone has had any experience in combining OpenMosix and MythTV.  Can things like IVTV and LIRC be made to work well with the 2.4-based OpenMosix kernel?  Do processes in a MythTV setup migrate well in an OpenMosix cluster?  I suspect, though, that OpenMosix' Kernel 2.6 support needs to emerge from alphaware before it would be practical for MythTV.