Latency, IRQ, lockups, sluggish interface
Submitted by gilberti69 on January 6, 2008 - 2:26pm
Been researching this and at the bottom of Daniel Robbins' PCI Latency article (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-hw2.html) he mentions a program called Powertweak (http://powertweak.sourceforge.net/).
I have recently used Powerstrip on my XP games box to tweak PCI latency values so have some small understanding of these and was wondering if anyone has tried this out?
If not I am going to have a stab at setting up my MythDora box with it and will report back. (I've been meaning to test out the new smoke detector in the room anyway!)
The posts you refer to are
The posts you refer to are way to old to apply to anything now. You also have to be careful of "tweaking" things as you could damage things. And Powerstrip is an ATI tool to get modelines for xorg, how are you getting PCI latency tweaks from that?
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
Powerstrip does a lot more
Powerstrip does a lot more than just tweak modelines but as it's not Linux that's not an issue. I have noticed my system seems to 'hold it's breath' every few second, paticularly on startup. This can also be noticed in the BIOS setup screen. The most annoying reult of this is it igoring keypresses, which makes it a pain when typing passwords particularly as you can't see what you've typed!
If I su (which normally takes about six attempts because of this) and do the following, the problem is noticeably reduced -
setpci -v -s 01:05.0 latency_timer=b0 # VGA controller
setpci -v -s 00:10.0 latency_timer=b0 # IDE
This sets the latency b0h (176) and as this merely gives these two controllers longer control, if necessary, over the PCI bus to pass data it cannot cause damage.
All I need to do now is figure out how to get these to be applied at startup so I don't have to fight my way into root!.
Incidentally I couldn't get 'Powertweak' to install so I don't know if it's of any use in these cases.
System:
XP2400+
Gigabyte 7vkmp
Zotax GF6200
768MB RAM
Pinnacle 300i
Terratec Aureon 5.1
250gb + 200gb Maxtor HD's
Sony 32" widescreen CRT
Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
ATI remote wonder
MythDora 4 with mythtv ugraded via yum -y upgrade \*myth\*
System:
XP2400+
Gigabyte 7vkmp
Zotax GF6200
768MB RAM
Pinnacle 300i
Terratec Aureon 5.1
250gb + 200gb Maxtor HD's
Sony 32" widescreen CRT
Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
ATI remote wonder
MythDora 4 with mythtv upgraded via yum -y upgrade \*myth\*
Quote: All I need to do
All I need to do now is figure out how to get these to be applied at startup so I don't have to fight my way into root!.
Enter these two commands at the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local and Walla !!!
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
Thanx, I'll try that when I
Thanx, I'll try that when I get home. Hopefully these problems will go away when I can convince my 'Financial Director' we need a new motherboard and processor. LOL!
System:
XP2400+
Gigabyte 7vkmp
Zotax GF6200
768MB RAM
Pinnacle 300i
Terratec Aureon 5.1
250gb + 200gb Maxtor HD's
Sony 32" widescreen CRT
Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
ATI remote wonder
MythDora 4 with mythtv ugraded via yum -y upgrade \*myth\*
System:
XP2400+
Gigabyte 7vkmp
Zotax GF6200
768MB RAM
Pinnacle 300i
Terratec Aureon 5.1
250gb + 200gb Maxtor HD's
Sony 32" widescreen CRT
Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
ATI remote wonder
MythDora 4 with mythtv upgraded via yum -y upgrade \*myth\*