So its been a little while since I last posted so let me update you all.
My Girlfriend (Claire) and I are looking around for a house, making the big move in together. I never realised how stressful just looking is! We have seen a fair few that we like, and have arranged several viewings but time will tell. I’ve also got quite addicted to “Ladette to Lady” on TV. I didnt realise watching stupid pompous old grannies and crazy young girls would be so entertaining.
Oh, and then there is my car. The accident magnet. As some of you probably know some stupid woman crashed into it, which I had to claim for an so on, and I have just now (after months of waiting) recieved the estimates. Well, I sat down for my dinner the other day and the door-bell rang so I went to see who it was. Some kid (good on him for not running off mind) appologised for riding down the road, losing control and crashing into the side of my car. It left a rather tidy scratch all down the rear passenger-side panel, and also a nice dint. Less than impressed 🙁
Also, no idea how many people have seen this but its pretty awesome. Basically, 18 real life taxi cabs fitted with GPS and split into teams of three. You pick a “team” as your online monopoly piece and when a cab is near/on your property after the round is up, you get paid rent. equally you pay rent in the same way. Very cool!
Anyways, on a more technical note I’ve been playing with the Asus PUNDIT-R’s as a solution to running Asterisk with some difficulty. The digium card (TE110P) is based on a well documented, open card with open specs. Problem being there is just enough variation in it to make it a pig. Once you enable the spans on the card, the card will begin to send interrupts (in a frequency similar to the timer) and also enables DMA access. now, the IDE bus on this machine has a faulty DMA as it is, and also it appears a faulty (IO/L)APIC implementation.
Im still in the process of trying to diagnose as to why the box will hardlock under minimal load exactly, but it is almost certainly to do with the way it handles DMA, and more than likely it just clobbers userspace memory regions which will then be over-written by userspace, which then currupts kernel-space and hangs.
However, if anyone has any experience with these boxes, this hardware, and asterisk please give me a shout and let me know how you got on. I have even tried forcing interrupt allocation to the BIOS in a check to ensure sensible sharing.
I just got a Pundit-R as well, and am running into the same annoying DMA issues, though not with Asterisk. The BIOS does weird, creepy things, like abstracting the SATA interface into the Secondary IDE controller, which makes it impossible for me to enable DMA on the drive using hdparm. Have you found anything out yet?
Hiya.
Well not a great deal really which will be effecting you.
basically, DMA on that box is screwed, dont bother with it!
Its actually a bad combination of hardware, and dodgy standard implementations.
All in all, for something which requires hardware to actually perform as you might expect, these boxes arent worth the hassle.
I found out how to get DMA enabled on the CD drive! Someone found out how to do it here:
http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/001023.html
The trick however is that
a) the drive MUST be jumpered to Slave
b) the drive MUST be plugged into the BLUE connector on the motherboard, not the white
c) the drive MAY have to use the connector at the end of the IDE cable instead of the one in the middle
It seems that it sets SATA to use the Secondary IDE bus and the blue connector on the motherboard will accept slave devices for the Primary IDE bus while the white connector on the motherboard accepts slave devices for the Secondary IDE bus. And the buses aren’t entirely separate…seems like DMA on two Master devices (even on different buses, unless they’re not actually different ones under the hood) causes problems.
Regardless, I hope this helps you. I can now burn a DVD without a load average of 2.00 and a four-hour wait.
Wow, this is the first time i am reading someone having at least similar problems with his pundit. I do use one as our appartment server and it crashes after about 5-15 days regular use. Under high load (like encrypting a harddisk) with a few hours.
I have tried plenty of things like disabling IDE DMA and ACPI. I have replaced nearly all peripherials, did bios updates etc etc … this damned thing keeps crashing.
Do you have found a solution in the meantime?
Till