Assistance with a dual-core machine.

Assistance with a dual-core machine.

[Keith Hinton]

Hello all on the ilst,
At this time, (although) I am sure that CVS SpeechD-up/Dispatcher sounds great, I do not wish to test it..and would rather run stable releases of the code.
At this present time, there are complex threading problems with the stable  programs with an SMP system.
I run Gentoo half of the time on my dual-core AMD Athlon 3800+, X2 processor system.
Now, this may be a better question to ask Hynek in particular.
But I thought I'd ask on this list, you all may be able to assist, sinse I'll be using Speakup, of course in the console.
If I turn off SMP (a workaround) I have created and of wich I am upset about doing, although it does work at the loss of my second valuable and useful core, I noticed speech-dispatcher/SpeechD-up/etc will run on "CPU0."
Now, if I let the system boot into standard SMP, SpeechD-up and Dispatcher are probably launching randomly on both cores at random, and not sticking with one.
Spisifically, I would like to keep using SMP and keep the power of this dual-core box the way it was ment to be.
To do this though I require help, and this is where I really need a person (with an SMP system) spisifically to reply, please.
Could anyone with the abuv computer systems (you need a dual-core or multi-core box) before replying though.. but could someone try to assist me on forcing the dispatcher/SpeechD-up processes on boot time and when launched by the Gentoo init.d system, to use only CPU0 and never run threads on both cores therefore allowing me to run with SMP and probably not having these problems until new public releases are made available?
Thank ou!
And please, (don't tell me to play with nice levels. That is totally not the point of this post or problem, please.) I won't do it anywyas eaven if you suggest that. Doing nice-levels will never get rid of the threading issues.
Regards, --Keith.

Re: Assistance with a dual-core machine.

[Samuel Thibault]

Hi,

For such a long question, there is a simple answer: use numactl ;)

Samuel

Re: Assistance with a dual-core machine.

[Kerry Hoath]

This is not possible. You can not tell certain threads to run on certain 
cores without modifying the code itself. Also the problems with 
speechdup/speech dispatcher on multi-core systems relate to the fact that 
multiple threads run concurrently rather than running in a pre-emptive 
manner.
That is to say on a single core only one process runs at a time; with each 
process scheduled into running one after the other.

The code in speechdup/speech dispatcher needs to be rewritten to take into 
account the possibility of multiple threads running at once, and your only 
solution to running this stabily on your system is to disable your second 
core or run and test cvs code.
Without testers it will take far longer to debug these problems; and unless 
you are willing to run a single core you sacrifice stability regardless of 
whether the code is cvs or not.
cvs is not difficult to use; and you simply check out a source tree which 
you then build.

If you are not used to building from source; perhaps it is necessary to wait 
for the next stable release of these tools that will be stable and aware of 
smp systems.

Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Hinton" <keithint38@CommSpeed.net>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2007 6:10 PM
Subject: Assistance with a dual-core machine.


> Hello all on the ilst,
> At this time, (although) I am sure that CVS SpeechD-up/Dispatcher sounds 
> great, I do not wish to test it..and 

Re: Assistance with a dual-core machine.

[Jan Buchal]

>>>>> "KH" == Keith Hinton <keithint38@CommSpeed.net> writes:

    KH> Hello all on the ilst, At this time, (although) I am sure that
    KH> CVS SpeechD-up/Dispatcher sounds great, I do not wish to test
    KH> it..and would rather run stable releases of the code.
Hello,

so you must wait to the stable release which come I hope soon. Now are
all bug fixes in CVS and beforethe  stable release we need test it.
Regarding dual core machine I can say, that on my works now very well.

Have a nice day

-- 

Jan Buchal
Tel: (00420) 24 24 86 008
Mob: (00420) 608023021

Re: Assistance with a dual-core machine.

[Tomas Cerha]

Keith Hinton wrote:
> At this time, (although) I am sure that CVS SpeechD-up/Dispatcher sounds great, I do not wish
 > to test it.and would rather run stable releases of the code.

Hello Keith,

I quite don't understand your reason for refusing running CVS code. 
That's definitely much simpler and less troublesome than the whole thing 
with recompiling the kernel etc.

The only difference between the released and CVS code is that the 
released code:
A) contains the bug-fixes
B) has been tested.

A has been done by Hynek, but B can't be done without people testing it. 
  And this is how you can help it to become released.  Of course you 
have the choice to wait until others do so.  But if you don't want to 
wait, I don't see the point in going around rather than going straight.

Best regards, Tomas