Update: AMD and Microsoft have released patches to fix the TSC-drift problem. Read page 2 to find out where to get them.
The latest and newest in CPU technology is dual-core: this means having two CPUs on a single chip. Like real multi-processor (SMP), this greatly enhances processing power, among other benefits.
Unfortunately, there's a downside, called TSC-drift, causing serious trouble with certain applications and games.
random crashes: random crashes, which get worse the longer the computer is running. An application with logging usually complains about differences in "times".
sluggish performance: the performance of the application/game becomes very sluggish ...
Realtek has a new gigabit chipset which is appearing on various motherboards, including the Asus M2A-VM board. At the time of writing (with kernel 2.6.22 being the default), this driver is not yet included in the default kernel tree.
Thanks to Realtek's wonderful support for linux, they have the driver source for various Unix/Linux flavours available for download on their website.
Download the driver from the official download site.
First, have your dependencies in order by having the following:
A sane build environment (contains gcc, make, etc.)
The kernel tree and/or headers of your current kernel.
Root access for installing and using the driver (of course).
Finally, it's ready: my very new, special-ordered media pc. I mainly bought it to replace my (rather noisy) old pc with it, and to have a real looking PVR thingy.
Want to see pictures? Of course you do...
Half-front-side view, along with the big, silent fans.
The rear of the case, displaying HDMI, Audigy and TV tuner, among other things.
The internals of the case, displaying the various system components, like in any other system, really.
The line up: from bottoms up, the media pc, the radio tuner and amp, the cd player, and my MP3 player's at the top.
The system will be running Gentoo Linux, with MythTV, of course. Aside of the media thingy, it will host various files and stuff ...
Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem. For hardware, I had an old pc which I used as a server, but because of the wonderful capabilities of VMware, I decided to convert the machine to a so-called Media PC.
To contribute my efforts to the community, I decided to create some sort of a guide. It is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered.
The guide can be found i ...
Well, isn't this great... Thought I had a quiet weekend (well, relatively quiet, read the next post), with a bit of gaming and such. But apparently, my oh-so-wonderful water-cooled video card thought otherwise.
Twas Friday afternoon: I booted up my pc. Although it was a bit more silent than usually, I discarded it as being the bit cold weather of these days.
Thought it would be neat to do a bit of retro-gaming, and fired up the old Half-Life 1...
About two minutes in the game, alarms and whistles and popups went off, and as the message your card is too hot appeared on the screen, I distinctively shouted out: WTF!
I quickly cranked up the ATI console, and saw an astonashing 113 degrees C ! ...
Did a test on two DL380 G5 controllers to check out the difference between having a battery or not on a P400 SAS RAID controller. The results are remarkable, to say the least.
Both machines are fairly identical when looking at disk configuration: both have a P400 SAS controller with an equal amount of storage, but srv1 has 512MB with battery, srv2 has 256MB without battery.
I ran a dd test of a file, and this is the output:
srv1:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=./dump.dump bs=1k count=81920008192000+0 records in8192000+0 records out8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 48.282 seconds, 174 MB/s
srv2:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=./dump.dump bs=1k count=51200005120000+0 records in5120000+0 recor ...
It would've been too easy if the solution (read my previous post about this topic), would've just worked. With the source of the HP OpenIPMI package available (it seems to be included in the download), I thought it would be snap to get it compiled for our Etch kernel. I was wrong...
Downloading the .deb for sarge doesn't work on Etch right away because of a kernel version difference. Moreover, while the source of the OpenIPMI driver has been included, it does fit neatly into the kernel source, but the compiler bombs out with this:
CC [M] drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_msghandler.odrivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_msghandler.c: In function 'ipmi_smi_watcher_register':drivers/char/ ...
After a call to HP, there seems to be a solution present.
Apparently it's a known issue on these boxes, when one is using the open source IPMI, instead of the HP OpenIPMI.
The resolution was to install HP OpenIPMI. The full description is below:
Quote
DESCRIPTION
On an HP ProLiant ML350 G5 server configured with a single processor, if
the HP System Health Application and Insight Management Agents for Linux
are installed without the HP OpenIPMI (hp-OpenIPMI) device driver
loaded, a console message is displayed indicating that there is a
problem with the system fan and that the server will shut down in 60
seconds. After 60 seconds has passed, the server reboots. When this
occurs, the followi ...
Some time ago, Debian has finally been adopted officially by HP as a supported Operating System. They even have released packages for Sarge for it.
Of course, in the meantime, Etch is the new stable of Debian, thus, I had to revert back to the old tweaking ways, described at http://debian.catsanddogs.com/. On the various DL380 G5's I've worked with, this went very smoothly, and it runs perfectly. On the ML350 G5, it's something else...
The machine is a new ML350 G5, with a dual-core Xeon 5120. The system runs Etch AMD64 (stable), and everything seems to be in order. Installation of the agents went flawlessly either (with a bit of script tweaking to make up for the version difference).
A bootable linux LiveCD, preferrably Knoppix, but any other distro with all basic linux tools will do.
Some knowledge on how to use commandline based programs (and perhaps some knowledge with linux in general).
First, make sure to boot with your LiveCD. You won't need to boot entirely into the graphical interface.
For Knoppix, the boot: commandline would be something like:
You can leave out the vga=normal to use framebuffer instead of plain text mode. Replace your-keyboard-layout (keyboard layout) with your country code: for Belgium (azerty), this would be lang=be; for standard US (qwerty), use lang= ...
Since it was my birthday, and due to the lack of presents, I found it to be quite normal that I got a present for myself. A quick visit to my computer supplier, delivered me this thing of beauty: a water-cooled ATI Radeon X1950XT from MSI.
It was a bit necessary for me to upgrade the videocard. Although my old X850 was pretty fast, it missed a few things. Since I'm a huge fan of TES4 Oblivion, I thought it would be nice to spend a little to get more out of the game, especially because Oblivion is already a pretty heavy game to run. As it was with my X850, I missed out on HDR, which seriously improves the in-game looks. And of course, 256MB VRAM was a bit tight; the game would often run out ...
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