Back in the saddle

I've resumed posting to this blog after a 4-month hiatus. I was able to get MythTV running, but only after acquiring a new system. The specs of my new MythTV box are as follows:

Processor: Intel 3.0 GHz Dual-Core
Motherboard: NVIDIA chipset
Memory: 2 GB SDRAM
Hard Drive: 400 GB SATA drive, 300 GB IDE drive
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 7300
TV Tuner: 2 Hauppauge PVR-150s

So far, the biggest problems were (1) the SATA drivers timing out when I capture to the SATA drive, and (2) an IVTV driver timeout problem.

I didn't really solve the SATA timeout issue; I just switched the MythTV file share to the IDE drive. The IVTV timeout issue was solved by disabling the irqbalance daemon. Apparently, if you have a dual processor system, the irqbalance daemon is enabled by default. The irqbalance daemon "balances" the irq requests across both sets of IRQs (each processor gets 24). If it's not enabled, Linux will still use both processors' IRQs if necessary, but it won't be balanced across the processors. Apparently, IVTV doesn't like IRQ balancing, at least in those cases where a tuner shares a resource with something else - in this case, the on-board sound chipset. After disabling irqbalance, both tuner cards worked fine.