CPU Speed and Throttling with 2007.1

[kfoss]

I've just finished upgrading my Spring PP+ to the 2.6.21 kernel to save my system. With the basic 2.6.17 kernel my processor and system as a whole was burning up. I have a Jetway J7F2WE-2GHz board. With the default kernel I was unable to get the CPU to operate below 54-60C. This is pretty hot for a Mini-ITX system. Only when I somehow forced the CPU to 800MHz did the temperature drop below 50C.

 

Now I heard that the 2.6.21 kernel has built in CPU speed and throttling capabilities. Well it does and they work perfectly. No setup, they just work. My temps not range from 35 to 45C.

 

I'd like to plead with the developers to move the default kernel to 2.6.21 soon. I know that there are more criteria but this can contribute to the decision.

 

Thanks.

[theYinYeti]

Hello!

 

As you probably know, this board is not officially affiliated in any way with Mandriva; we're just users of Mandriva.

Yet thank you for sharing. I also have an EPIA board, currently running 2007.0, and I was wondering if upgrading to 2007.1 was worth the effort. Is there any improvement with 2007.1+k2.6.21 over 2007.0 for running a media/living-room PC?

 

off-topic...: I would be interested in knowing what software you use. I tried Myth but it was way too heavy for the M10000N, then I tried VDR, but couldn't find how to configure it. Now I'm just using plain Gnome+Nautilus+Xine.

 

Yves.

[kfoss]

Yves,

Yes actually, I saw a great benefit from this upgrade. I ran 2006.0 for a long time on my old PC (AMD64 3700+) which provided lots of power for applications and things. I recently got rid of this loud, hot and power hungry PC for the Via 2GHz board from Jetway.

 

When building the Via system, I tried using 2006.0 and 2007.0 but I ran into problems getting the XvMC (MPEG-2 H/W Acceleration) working. There always seems to be bug that prevented me from getting XvMC to work. XvMC is great when doing things like watching a DVD since it unloads most of the decoding off the processor. I can run a DVD at 10-15% CPU usage!

 

So I ended up installing Fedora Core 6 since I was able to get XvMC working with a little work. However, I quickly move from KDE to Gnome to IceWM in order to make the system more responsive. It was sluggish to say the least. I had all the normal applications I needed, but I'm diehard Mandriva.

 

I just bought a new 500GB SATA harddrive a week ago and decided to take the chance to see if there were any updates to Mandriva. Since "Spring" was out I just back onto the Mandriva boat and installed it. I was concerned right from the beginning about the temperatures, always being high. After a lot of research on CPU speed modules and apps I happened to find an article that said that the 2.6.21 kernel has CPU frequency and throttling built in as default. I found a Mandriva 2.6.21 kernel for 2007.1 and upon reboot found the temperature dropped to normal.

 

So to summarize, I think that you could benefit from the upgrade. 2007.1 is smoother and at least for me added XvMC. You may not need the2.6.21 upgrade with the 1GHz Via, but it wouldn't hurt.

 

As well, I know that the user forum is not affiliated with Mandriva, but I am pretty sure that the developers look here for ideas, problems, etc.

 

Lastly, on your "off-topic" note, I also have an M10000 Via 1 GHz PC for the TV and media. It's connected to our main TV and we use it to record our favourite shows. I personally still have 2006.0 running with Myth. It have 1GB of RAM and only a 60GB notebook drive. I think that the key factor is that I have a Hauppauge PVR150 which has a hardware encoder on it. The PC is stable and has been running for about 9 months straight (one power outage during that time), without any intervention. In this case the media player is MPlayer-based, and MEncoder does the encoding. I don't actually use the Jetway system as a PVR, just as a PC. I do watch TV using TVTime and watch DVDs/videos with MPlayer.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Kevin

Edited May 10, 2007 by kfoss

[theYinYeti]

Thank you :)

 

Re-reading your posts, I think my problem actually is the 256MB. IMO, this keeps me from using nice apps like Myth...

As a RAM upgrade is not in my near-future plans, and Gnome+Xine does well for DVDs without the need of XvMC, I'll just keep things as they are for now.

 

Yves.

[kfoss]

Xine does employ code that uses the embedded H/W accelerator. Have a look for "xxmc" and "xine". Should be able to get this working fairly easily.

 

Kevin

[adamw]

CPU throttling is actually in the kernel used by 2007 Spring. It just sounds like your CPU wasn't covered until a later kernel.

 

We would never do a kernel version update for a stable release. Once a stable release is made, the kernel version for it is set: it will only ever get patches to that kernel. So 2007.1 will always be based on a 2.6.17 kernel.

 

2008 will introduce a new basesystem with a newer kernel version (probably 2.6.22 or so).

[kfoss]

adamw,

Thanks. I wasn't implying that there needed to be a change to 2007.1, just that the developers consider moving to at least 2.6.21 for the next version. I normally see that there are always some people that end up on the short end of the stick on a new version, this time it ended up being me. I was happy to have found the 2.6.21 kernel to solve my problems, without introducing new one.

 

Kevin