APM problems with VDR

[Christian Meder <meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de>]

Hi,

recently I purchased the hardware for building my own VDR, a project which
was intriguing me for quite some time.

My machine is a close clone of the one from the VDR project page:

K6/2-500 (underclocked to 350)
WD 45g hard drive
ASUS P5A mainboard
Hauppauge DVB-S card
100mb network
DVD drive
and 
the black desktop case from the VDR project page (yes, there are a few left
from the company)

First of all a big thank you to the Metzler Bros and Klaus Schmidinger
for the very good software.

I've got no real problems with the driver or the VDR software. I'm still 
using the keyboard for VDR navigation until a friend of mine builds a 
couple of IRmans.

My only real problem is with power saving. Contrary to most people's problem
the system does suspend but way too _often_. So everytime while recording
the system goes into suspend after 3 minutes and stops recording which is 
kind of pointless with a VDR.

My BIOS settings are max powersaving (doze 1min, standby 1min, suspend 1min,
hdd spindown 3min). Ok what did I try so far:

* BIOS version 1009.beta1, 1011.beta2 (the current one), I haven't tested
1007a because it won't support hdd over 32gig

* experimented with various BIOS settings for powersaving without success

* kernels 2.2.17 with and without ide-patches, 2.4.0-test9 with APM, 
2.4.0-test9 with ACPI

* software VDR 0.65, dvb0.7.1

The results:

* 2.2.17 without hdparm or ide-patches tends to lock up because of buffer
overruns (the hdd doesn't use DMA then)

* 2.2.17 and 2.4.0-test9 with APM do work but go into suspend while recording

* 2.4.0-test9 with ACPI does work but doesn't do any powersaving (the CPU
fan isn't turned off)

* 2.2.17 and 2.4.0-test9 with APM turned off in the BIOS do work but 
obviously don't do any powersaving

* the dvb driver works well with 2.2.17 and 2.4.0-test9

* the system only wakes up from suspending when there's keyboard activity 

Anybody (perhaps Klaus because he's got the same motherboard) has an idea
how to enable APM _and_ avoid suspending while recording ?


		


				Christian

-- 
Christian Meder, email: meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de
 
What's the railroad to me ?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows, 
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.
                      (Henry David Thoreau)