Re: [LAU] Bug: kernel or ardour related?

On 15/12/2008 23:23:44, Matthias Schönborn reported his system hanging
for a few seconds, an ACPI related message and a subsequent segfault
from running ardour with fglrx-modules on a rt kernel.

In general, any complete hang indicates a bug in the kernel, one of the
modules the kernel has loaded or data the kernel has imported (for
example, ACPI tables).

This is because an application, such as ardour, only runs when the
kernel permits it to run and only has access to the memory the kernel
has granted it access to. Sometimes a badly behaving application can
expose a bug in the kernel that well-behaved applications do not and
maybe the bad behaviour is a result of a bug in the application but the
kernel bug is still there.

In your case there are three things that all live inside the kernel
memory that are potential suspects:

1. The fglrx modules.
2. The -rt patch
3. Your BIOS's APCI tables.

It is possible, though harder, to change the APCI tables so I would
start with the other two, i.e. try running ardour with:

A non-rt kernel but with the fglrx modules.

A rt kernel with whatever graphics card driver you can make work with
your hardware that is part of the kernel rather than the fglrx modules,
even if this is VGA or VESA mode. Even if it not very usable like that
it will still prove the point.

This may isolate one of the two as being at fault. If it works fine in
both of those two combinations above but not when fglrx and rt are
installed together then maybe the writers of fglrx made assumptions
that don't hold true with rt, i.e. they are not compatible.

If both of the above combinations show the same hang problem then maybe
it is time to look at the ACPI tables.

Regards,
Steve.
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Received on Tue Dec 16 16:15:02 2008