[ardour-users] OT - 2.6.11 kernels for audio

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 02:17:42PM -0700, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 14:08, Aaron Trumm wrote:
> > > Yeah, sounds like a plan. Lee and Fernando are both a great help. I do
> > > this only about twice a year. I did it last October and have been
> > > running at sub-3mS since then on 2.6.9. However all learning I did is
> > > long lost. Must start over again.
> > >
> > > I've heard nothing about ext3 problems. Then again I subscribe to very
> > > few lists these days.
> > 
> > I'm watching all this very closely :)
> > 
> > ext3 problems??  I apparentely just had a reiserfs problem.  but that might
> > have also been an ardour bug.  one person on the dev list seems to think so
> 
> Hmmmm, it would seem to me that's unlikely. An ardour bug should not
> trash a filesystem (any). But maybe that is possible. 
> 

I forgot to follow up on that thread.... but, big corruptions in
ANY stable filesystem (reiser, ext3, whatever) should not be dismissed
as "maybe it's the app".  These most often come down to hardware
failures.  I once had an ext2 fs get very very badly hosed by some
bad RAM.  This can happen intermittently and is hard to pin down.
A couple good tests for bad RAM are:

* memtest86, download it & make a boot disk & boot it (or if you use
  grub for booting, just add it as a boot target in grub.conf).
  Leave it running overnight.

* The old kernel compile loop.  This is less informative than
  memtest86, but rumour has it that this test will barf (indicating
  bad memory) in some cases when memtest86 can't find a problem.

  Attached is a shell script that will attempt to compile the kernel 100
  times.  If any errors occur, it will bail out.
  It will print the running total in a file /usr/src/last_compile.txt.
  Run this under nohup as root and leave it going overnight.

  It's probably good to be sure first that your kernel config is sane
  and that you can compile the kernel at least once ;-)

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
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