[LAU] trial and error

Matthew Smith matt at smiffytech.com
Mon Aug 18 16:47:21 EDT 2008


Quoth Hamish Low at 2008-08-19 05:54...
<snip/>
> Still I have problems, partly I guess because I'm not a techie, but I've 
> been stubborn enough to keep trying all this time.  Anyway the point I'm 
> at now is that I can boot up into the realtime kernel - I need to go 
> into a failsafe gnome session as then flgrx doesn't start up (it's 
> really greedy with processing power, but when I'm not making audio it is 
> very useful and looks great), and compiz-switch only turns off the 
> effects, it doesn't free up the processor. 
<snip/>

'Fraid I can only answer one part of that - I can tell you that the 
fglrx module is NOT compatible with RT kernels.  Taking it out of the 
equation also appears to free up an interrupt.

In a realtime system, you really want to strive for minimalism in all 
the non-audio parts of the system - NO fancy visual effects or anything 
like that.  If you get rid of anything that takes CPU time but is not 
essential to your operation, you are less likely to start falling foul 
of the dreaded Jack xruns.

At the moment, I am dual-booting my system between realtime and 
non-realtime kernels.  This allows me to have a totally different set of 
runlevels for audio work, disabling the onboard sound card, wireless 
networking and a load of other bits and pieces that I use for my work 
(Apache, MySQL, etc).  Taking these bits that are not required for audio 
work makes a huge difference, especially the on-board sound which was 
causing most of the xrun problems.

Hope you get working soon!

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development
Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/
Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/
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