[mythtv-users] PREEMPT kernel with nvidia

Paul Andreassen paulx at andreassen.com.au
Sat Jan 5 12:48:23 UTC 2008


On Friday 04 January 2008 03:24, Paul Bender wrote:
> Paul Andreassen wrote:
> > 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.
>
> On my dedicated Myth frontends, I have had the kernel configured with
> voluntary kernel preemption (PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY) and large block
> preemption (PREEMPT_BKL) for some time (at least since the 2.6.17 kernel
> (I am now on the 2.6.23 kernel)). The NVIDIA proprietary drivers work
> well and the frontend is responsive.
>
> Some time ago, while using the 2.6.17 kernel, had tried configuring with
> kernel preemption (PREEMPT), this gave me problems with no benefit. As a
> result, I stopped using it.

Thanks for the responces.  I believe the problem is related to my memory.  I 
enabled the BIOS option "Flexibility Option" which somehow helps with miss 
matched modules.  My 2*512M modules are faster then the 2*1G modules.

Paul


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