"Florian D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:30:54 +0200:
> I have been hitting by a bug for ages, which I want to get rid of > eventually ;) > > It is not possible for me to watch TV via xawtv, while doing IO intensive > tasks in the background. In the majority of cases, it suffices to copy a, > say, 50MB file from my USB-stick to the harddisk to freeze my amd64 > machine (but, funny enough, the sound is playing further on). No way to say this is what you are experiencing without knowing more details than you could have provided in a first post on the subject, but in many cases, such problems are due to running the wrong or a generic hard drive (PATA/SATA/SCSI whatever) chipset driver, or perhaps more often, a bunch of such drivers -- I've seen as many as eight different drivers loaded on the same machine, where only one or possibly two would normally be used. Get the wrong one loaded or loaded before the right one so the right one has nothing to grab, and you don't get DMA activated, and the CPU must be much more intimately involved in every I/O transaction, which also goes much slower. So make sure you have the right one running, and aren't loading a bunch of others, and that DMA is active (merge hdparm and read the manpage). The problem in this case would be slow non-DMA I/O interfering with video DMA as well. The problem could also be a non-optimally configured xorg or extensions, or selecting a type of video transfer that your particular video hardware and xorg driver don't support. Finally, flaky memory, overclocking and/or overheating, or an unstable power supply chain (from the wall outlet thru the UPS if you have one, thru the PSU) can do it. Of course, these are likely to show up in other areas as well, such as when merging on Gentoo. I've had all those problems at one time or another. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
