[ardour-users] What kernel are you running?

[John Mifsud]

I found the 2.6 kernel series useable with ardour from 2.6.0-test2 and it
was a lot less hassle with alsa compiles, it's on 2.6.2 now. My workstation
was (was!! - a lightning strike through the modem cable that I forgot to
unplug )-:  a AMD Duron 1100, via chipset 1.5 Gb of memory and a delta
1010lt, on RedHat 8, recorded to 6 channels at 44 no problem on ardour/jack
of various versions. I suspect I could have got it to 8 channels but never
got the chance to find out - besides the machine was at the limit of it's
upgrades.

My current workstation is a 2.8 P4 Gigabyte mother board with 2 Gb ram
running dual channel. The ICH5 controller seems to be problematic with
2.6.3 (would not boot), so I have stuck with 2.6.2 until those issues are
resolved (and I save enough for some SATA drives).

Just thought I'd mention (reading about people having memory problems) that
there was a serious memory issue with kernel versions previous to 2.4.25
and 2.6.3 that were apparent under load and handling large files - these
issues were mentioned in performance tuning guides - and cause the machine
to swap instead of releasing memory making machines sluggish under load. My
database server at work was recently bitten with this problem and it's
niggling to track down unless you are aware of it (which I was because I
was tuning my DAW for ardour).

In comparison to 2.4, I find the 2.6 kernel more responsive on the user
interface and just easier to set-up. I had to replace the modutils and make
a few mods to the startup scripts in rc.d to get things to work properly
but other than that 2.6 is definitely a step forward. The only issue I have
is that RedHat 8 (or 9) isn't really prepared for 2.6 kernel - and I'm not
sure what other distributions are except Fedora core 2 which is my next
scheduled O.S upgrade (when it is released).