Re: [linux-audio-user] AMD Turion 64 X2 ?

On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 17:04:20 +0100 (BST)
"Michael Pacey" <michael@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> oz said:
>
> > Do the realtime patches of Ingo Molnar work with SMP-Kernels for
> > example? And the LSM-modules?
>
> Pretty sure Ubuntu ships an AMD64 kernel with PREEMPT and SMP enabled. I
> have personally used the realtime-lsm module on an Debian as-shipped SMP
> kernel, though not running on an SMP machine. Most (all?) of Debian's
> (x86) kernels (and presumably Ubuntu's) ship with SMP enabled by default,
> because it still works on uniprocesser machines without overhead. I talk
> about Ubuntu and Debian because that's what I use.

Aha, thanks, that are strong hints, that the realtime patches
compile cleanly against SMP-Kernels (that's good!). But it says not much
about the achieved realtime capabilities.

The situation with the Debian-Kernels seems not to be as clear to me.
Recently I installed a Debian/stable on a dual Opteron and the default
Kernel supported only one cpu (cat /proc/cpuinfo). I had to
post-install a dedicated SMP-Kernel (2.6.15x-SMP). It seems, Debian has
always two versions (SMP and not) of a Kernel. Eventually the
new debian-installer from etch does a better autodetection
and installs a SMP-kernel by default.

> If you can wait a week or two, I am getting a dual Opteron X2 (4 core
> 64-bit) machine this week and my intention is to do audio work on it. I
> can tell you how it goes. I hope it goes well, I've spent a lot of money!

Yeah, that would be great to read about it here in the forum!
And I have to wait anyway, because my favorite notebook is not
available the next few weeks.

> It's not a laptop. That will bring other complications, I'msure - take
> note of Frank Barknecht's comments on drivers. I have a laptop with Intel
> Centrino chipset and it works well, though it is not fast enough for my
> audio work (softsynths and rosegarden, moving sequences about, quickly, in
> realtime). The graphics card is not Intel, it's ATI, and I'm having to use
> their proprietary driver to get what I want out of it. The graphics in the
> Opteron box will be nVidia though, so there's no escape as yet...

Ok, but that was a mono-processor (right?). Best wishes for your
quadro-core system! When it will be really fast, chances are good,
that a dual-core in a laptop can be sufficient for me.

Thanks for your comments,
Oliver
Received on Tue Jul 11 08:15:07 2006