On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Emanoil Kotsev wrote: > I've recently installed a debian prebuild kernel 2.6.26.5 on my DELL D520 > (Centrino Duo Core 2 with 2GB RAM). Before I was using 2.6.26 booting > from usb drive, but I was missing the ata support for my internal drive > that's why I had to update. After I installed the new kernel I'm not able > to watch tv and compile in the same time or record tv and watch in the > same time. I'm even not able to just record tv.... That's strange. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400, which is basically the same machine but I think older: CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 @ 1.83GHz, and it has 1Gb RAM. As I'm writing this I am watching HDTV (looks like MPEG2 containing mpgv video and a52 audio) captured by a HDHomeRun tuner ( http://www.silicondust.com/ ) and played by VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) using the XVideo rendering interface. At the same time I'm compiling a source package. Here's what the "top" command shows me: top - 22:07:39 up 5:47, 4 users, load average: 1.57, 0.94, 0.53 Cpu0 : 74.5%us, 6.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 11.3%id, 1.3%wa, 2.6%hi, 4.3%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 1.6%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1034772k total, 863240k used, 171532k free, 46620k buffers Swap: 2104472k total, 0k used, 2104472k free, 443000k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 20276 jimc 25 0 66960 37m 21m S 57 3.7 3:33.02 vlc 25830 root 25 0 16944 13m 4068 R 13 1.4 0:00.40 cc1 3094 root 15 0 111m 75m 48m S 10 7.5 4:41.71 X (etc.) So I'm using most (not all) of one core and the other is almost unused. In another trial a few months ago I tried an old 1.0 GHz Pentium III "Coppermine" with an analog TV tuner, and it could just barely compress (record) the video and play it back at the same time -- not satisfactory for a production solution but interesting as a demo. So applying to your case I can't figure why your machine is so overloaded. You aren't doing a parallel "make", are you? With only 2 cores and a commitment to TV processing, parallel "make" would only make trouble. Suggestion: use "top" to find out what is hogging your CPU. Sometimes you will find processes that count in the load average but which aren't really using much CPU. The symptoms suggest thrashing (too much continuously moving pages between swap and main RAM) -- look at how much swap is being used, zero in my case. The resident set (column headed RES) is the important figure for memory use, when thrashing is suspected. I'm surprised that your distro's kernel was unsatisfactory. In the usual case that the disc driver (ata_piix in my case) is not hardwired in the kernel, you can use an initrd to preload it, and most distros will take care of building the initrd automatically and telling GRUB (the booter) to read it. I assume standard Debian does so, though I've never run Debian on an Intel box, only ARM handhelds. (I use OpenSuSE 10.3.) It's possible but unlikely that you made a bad choice when configuring your custom kernel. For example, if SMP (multiple processors) were turned off, that would not help at all. I hope some of this helps! James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Email: jimc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-laptop" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
