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#1 2008-10-12 19:20:55

Varnsen
Member
Registered: 2008-08-24
Posts: 10

b43 process CPU spikes

Hi,

I have a Broadcom wireless card WL-138G V2

lspci

00:0a.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

While watching x264 encoded clips that sometimes there would be random framedrops. This has been happening since I installed Arch (about 2months ago) but I figured that it was my CPU that was kind of slow to playback x264.

A few days ago, I happened to have top running in a terminal while watching a x264 clip and I noticed that a b43 process would spike to ~100% CPU usage. b43 is the kernel module for my wireless card.

I tried renicing the process's priority to 20 (default is -5) and I had virtually no framedrop in the x264 clip. The spike still occurs but because it has a very low priority I almost don't notice it. The renice to 20 has no adverse effects on network speed, at least during regular computer usage, but it sucks havin to do this manually everytime I reboot.

dmesg or any of the logs don't show anything related to this.

Does anyone have any suggestions or help on debugging this to eliminate the spikes?

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#2 2008-10-12 23:34:23

pyther
Member
Registered: 2008-01-21
Posts: 1,395
Website

Re: b43 process CPU spikes

You might want to give kernel 2.6.27 a go and see if they fixed that issue....


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