[Openchrome-users] Fwd: opencrome in Debian 5 on Epia M.

[Francesco Bochicchio]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Francesco Bochicchio <bieffe62 at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/3/22
Subject: Re: [Openchrome-users] opencrome in Debian 5 on Epia M.
To: Xavier Bachelot <xavier at bachelot.org>




2009/3/21 Xavier Bachelot <xavier at bachelot.org>

> Francesco Bochicchio wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> > I have a box with an EPIA M board (Nehemiah 1GHz) which includes  a
> CLE266
> > card.
> > Previously I installed on it Ubuntu 7.10, which worked ok. I used the
> 'via'
> >  xorg driver which came with the distro (I think it was not using
> > acceleration) and could watch DiVX and even DVD (sometime a little slow)
> > with mplayer.
> >
> > Now I have 'upgraded' the box to Debian stable (5.0). This distro comes
> with
> > two drivers which work with my hardware, xerver-xorg-video-via and
> > xerver-xorg-video-openchrome. Unfortunately, with both drivers, mplayer
> (and
> > also vlc) causes random freezes of the box. By random I mean that it
> plays
> > for a while, but usually the freeze occurs in the first half-hour. I
> think
> > it crashes the kernel, not just freezes X, because after that I cannot
> reach
> > the box by network.
> >
> Could you please post your xorg conf and xorg log ?
> Did you try to remove the debian provided package and update to
> openchrome svn trunk ?
> If that doesn't help, could you please post a backtrace of the crash ?
>
> CLE266 should be well supported, including hardware acceleration.
>
> Regards,
> Xavier
>

Wow, that was a quick reply :-) Thanks.

I actually have some hopefully good news. Yesterday I compiled and installed
my own kernel. As kernel configuration, I started with the one in the stock
kernel and removed all the features that I know I don't need, like SMP and
cpu clock-stepping.

I was hoping in this way to remove some new feature that interfered with
hardware accelleration, since as I said in ubuntu 7.10 everything was OK. It
seems to have worked, bcause since yesterday I had no crash and I used
mplayer at least for 4 hours straight. Usually the problem occurs in the
first hour of mplayer use.

It is not a definitive proof, since I remember once being able to play three
hours without problems, but it is encouraging.
If it is confirmed, it seems that the problem is some bad interaction
betweek kernel and x driver. For a while, I suspected CPU
clock-stepping : with stock-kernel, the default was about 650 MHz, while
with my kernel and stepping disabled is fixed at 1 GHz . I thought that
maybe playing a video would require the kernel to increase CPU frequency and
that did not
work because of some weird difference between intel CPU and VIA CPU.
 However, this should happen also with
non-accelerated X driver (even more so), and instead that was fine.

I did not try to use the latest driver. I might try if this does not work,
but I would need direction on how to compile it in Debian 5
(essentially which -dev packages I would need, so I don't go by trial and
error).


Ciao
-------
FB
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-users/attachments/20090322/ae196aea/attachment.html