gregoa's blog
random musings about computers, life, and everything
random musings about computers, life, and everything
entries from February 2008
2008-02-12 21:54:02 +0100
25 years
my summary of 25 years of development aid? well, I guess I got used to this
country; although I still dislike those walls-with-names that are put here
between the traces of civilization & the horizon ...
other calculation: I've spent more or less exactly two thirds of my
life so far here.
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2008-02-11 23:36:20 +0100
fun with 2.6.24, part II
after my laptop
I tried to get 2.6.24 running on my desktop machine; several attempts
(Debian kernels, self-compiled ones with different options) all led to the
same results: a machine that feels rather unresponsive & where music
has sporadic dropouts.
some searching on the intarweb showed that the new CFS scheduler
(cf. Documentation/sched-design-CFS.txt) (at least the
enabled-by-default CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED flavour) might have latency
problems, in itself or in combination with the ondemand CPU
frequency scaling governor or with nice'd processes; after turning
off all CONFIG_FAIR_* options in .config, recompiling
& rebooting the machine seems to behave normally.
maybe I'm missing some great new features but actually I prefer a working
desktop computer :)
update 1: approximately half an hour after the original blog entry I
had my first "ion sorbet", i.e. a half-frozen ion3 (the
applications are still running, I can switch to a tty but I cannot
change/close/whatever ion3's frames). at the moment I have no idea what's
going (wr)on(g) here ...
update 2: two more "ion sorbets" today yet; let's see if
a new kernel (CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED seems to be fixed in 2.6.24.1)
& a new ion3 version help.
update 3: still the same problems (& inbetween some glitches with
switching from X to a tty and back; I hope I solved them with some kernel
config options); ATM I suspect ion3 to be the culprit; when it
hangs it eats almost all the CPU, & strace'ing the pid gives only
SIGALRM messages.
update 4: maybe I fixed the problem; by changing
from ion3's deprecated statusbar_external.lua to the newer
statusd_exec.lua (I just wanted to get rid of the error when
starting ion3 ...).
update 5: & after compiling a kernel without PREEMPT
ion3-statusd doesn't get stuck at using all my cpu every once in a
while. or after removing some duplicated statusd_*.lua scripts. who
knows.
update 6: nope, ion3-statusd is still hogging the cpu.
argl.
update 7: I guess it's statusbar_external.lua's fault, as it
happens on my other machine too.
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2008-02-09 17:31:49 +0100
2.6.24 (finally)
no big step for humankind but I'm quite happy that linux 2.6.24 is finally
running on my laptop (thinkpad R60e). the culprit that caused the freezes
during earlier attempts was cpudyn; after deactivating it I had no
more problems so far.
what's not working is ath5k which seems to dislike my wifi card;
but the recent madwifi packages do what they are supposed to do.
JFTR:
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- I grabbed the latest kernel snapshot from the Debian kernel team's repo.
- after reading
#463353I downloaded kel's source packages for madwifi-*, built them, installed them, & built the modules as usual with m-a.
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