#10045 HIGH 1.5-sof: XO-1.5 Record audio/video are out of sync with each other

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:41 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> Yes, significantly.  What I've observed is most likely entirely due to
> vm.dirty_* behaviour.

Interesting! There was discussion on the kernel list (reported on lwn
iirc) about how to tweak this to improve behaviour under heavy write
scenarios...  instead of panicking every expire_centisecs (or when the
buffer fills up) and stalling horribly, the kernel should start
writing to disk a bit earlier and hopefully fast enough to avoid or
minimise the ugly stalls.

...

> causes the dd to finish in 7 seconds instead of 92 seconds, the sync to
> take much longer, and the write latencies are much smaller.

That's what I meant -- "fixing" this with larger values causes the
kernel to choke later, for longer. Others can paper over this with
gobs of RAM or faster disks... not us.

I can't remember the outcome of that discussion -- but might be worth
re-visiting. Recording video on our hardware (inc class 2 sd cards)
surely needs the kernel to behave well.

[ some googling ensues... ]

Cannot find the right lwn article, but I think setting
dirty_background_ratio and dirty_background_bytes should help in
kicking the kernel into action earlier, possibly avoiding the stall.

The relevant patch (landed in 2.9.29) has a good commit msg:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/23/160


m
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