AMD64 Experience

From MythTV

Jump to: navigation, search

Johan's excellent page led me here, and I wanted to put in my 0.02c about getting an AMD64 system running. I picked pretty much the same components as he did, ECS 755-A2 and a Sempron 64 3000+. Came in just shy of 150USD. I reused a stick of 256MB of PC3200DDR I had from the previous system.

I picked the A2 and the Sempron because they both support Cool N Quiet, a key feature in my mind. Initially the board came with an older 1.0f bios and didn't recognize my CPU, so I upgraded to the latest 1.1 and everything was fine. Initially the board wouldn't boot with RAM for the older machine. I had a stick of generic PC2700, and this caused it to hang. So be warned, this board is slightly picky on memory.

I started by doing a straight board swap and left the 32bit FC1 installation intact. Amazingly it mostly worked, but I started getting those nagging APIC error on CPU0 messages in my syslog. Then I had a fat crash caused by the SiS driver on the onboard IDE. Not wanting to risk it any longer I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to FC4.

So after backing up my MySQL installation and a few select config files, I installed a minimal install of FC4 X86_64. It installed fast, the Sempron 64 is suprisingly quick for such a moderately priced CPU.

This time all the hardware was recognized and came up, everything looked great. I then upgraded via YUM and brought down a 2.6.12 kernel. Next I used fedorafaq.org to add all the GPG keys and YUM repositories. I started yumming all the packages I needed including ivtv and mythtv from Axel's fab apt repository.

At this point, things went pie shaped. The ivtv 0.2.0-rc3j driver simply did not work. I tried compiling my own. I tried swapping firmware, moving the card around all to no avail. I was getting annoyed. I downloaded 0.3.3k. Still no dice. Basically with the 0.2 series I would get excessive logging. With the 0.3.3 series it would just lock up after a second or two of video. It was 2am at this point so I called it a day and turned everything off.

Next day I checked mythtv.info, and found Johans useful notes. I tried his suggestions but no luck. After taking a look at the wonderful gossamer ivtv-devel archives I tracked down the 0.3.7i release by Hans Verkuil and I decided to try that. Magic... Right now it's super smooth video. APIC is turned on and I have everything working just like before. Excellent.

Here's my IRQ table: (using command: cat /proc/interrupts) 

  -        CPU0         -
  0:     929310    IO-APIC-edge  timer
  1:          8    IO-APIC-edge  i8042
  8:          0    IO-APIC-edge  rtc 
  9:          0   IO-APIC-level  acpi
 12:        110    IO-APIC-edge  i8042
 15:       8150    IO-APIC-edge  ide1
169:       8942   IO-APIC-level  ide0, ide2, libata
177:      31837   IO-APIC-level  ide3, ide4
185:     300903   IO-APIC-level  eth0
193:       8070   IO-APIC-level  ivtv0
201:          0   IO-APIC-level  ehci_hcd:usb1
209:          0   IO-APIC-level  ohci_hcd:usb2
217:          0   IO-APIC-level  ohci_hcd:usb3
225:          0   IO-APIC-level  ohci_hcd:usb4
NMI:        118         -            -
LOC:     929146         -            -
ERR:          6         -            -
MIS:          0         -            -

As you can see, I have a few errors. Not sure what that's about, but everything is enabled, usb, sata. I have a e1000 LAN card in this machine too as it makes transfering large video files a snap. So far I'm a happy camper and really impressed with FC4 and 2.6.12 kernel on AMD64.

When idle the system runs at 1GHz and consumes about 98W, measured using a kill-a-watt. When transcoding video from mpeg2 to divix it jumps to 1.8GHz and consumes around 127W. I'm not saving as much power as I thought I would be. Oh well.

update 08/24/2005: The errors were coming from the i2c sensor chip sending interrupts and not having a driver to handle them. Adding lm_sensors fixed it and so far it's quiet, cool and working just great. I also added ivtv_dynbuf=0 to my modprobe.conf, which makes the initial video smoother when watching live TV by preallocating the buffers. Oops, spoke too soon. Looks like it's still throwing up those errors, but only when it's under load. Oh well. Doesn't seem to cause any real problems, so I guess I'll just live with them for now.


Some addtional info on 19 nov 2006 by 'ses':

Setup: fedora 6 64bit, amd3000, ati radeon 9200, 1 GB memory, etc. usual stuff. Mythtv 0.20.

Problem: frontend froze and took the whole computer down so that cold reboot was needed.

Possible reasons: using Fedora 6 xen kernel (at least the 3d display stuff did not work...). Also I had corruption in the mysql but the 'mysqlrepair' helped there but I don't think that could have been the reason. After I switched to 'normal' kernel the 3d acceleration stuff works and also the mythfrontend works. Hope this helps somebody someday (or I may have this wrong, so if you know better the reason for hangup then repair this...). Backend worked from start. (Also mythtv 0.17 in fedora 4 on same computer worked well.)


From cybernard on April 28, 2007

I have been running a AMD64 (single core) for over a year and it works perfectly. The only problem is running low on disk space. The system had 1GB of RAM and 2 ATI HDTV Tuners running on started with SuSE 10, but is now at 10.2. The SuSE 10.2 has a much better experience and with the ATI HDTV tuners the drivers are integrated, but you still have to download and copy the nxt2004 firmware to the correct location.

I have upgraded my system to shine new AMD X2 processor, and the only problems I have had so far is a couple of bad RAM chips. Which corrupted my file system, and had to reload. I have also added a RAID controller to grow my filesystem because LVM creates a "single drive failure" and all is lost situation.

Retrieved from "http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/AMD64_Experience"
Personal tools