[.:B:.]

Hi guys. New kid on the block here, but I've been running Linux for a while. I have installed Arch Linux (stable, not testing) on my AppleTV and it works smoothly. I got a Broadcom CrystalHD card and 720p h.264 playback works nicely with the SVN builds. I know recent nVidia binary drivers don't do HDMI audio, so I am using the RCA jacks for audio output at the moment. In runlevel 3 Linux uses under 30 MB RAM, so that leaves 200 MB + free for Xbmc and X to use. I'm not running any WM; when I switch to runlevel 5 Xbmc gets launched directly. My files are served by Mediatomb over UPnP, from the server on my LAN (IP 10.0.0.15).

However, when I enable 'Update library on startup', it will start updating on startup (as expected) but quickly maxes out the RAM. This happens with whatever version I try - be it the stable 9.11 (a binary package provided by Arch Linux) or recent SVN revisions (I have tried r28086, r28121, r28146, r28177, r28212, r28256 and r28276). I have been monitoring Xbmc's RAM usage through htop while it updated the library (and before it got killed) and swap fills quickly (to the point where it exceeds 256 MB, I never thought you could swap out more than you have RAM, but I guess you can). Doesn't matter whether I run Xbmc on the AppleTV OS or on Linux, it happens on both OSes and with all the versions I tried.

As an extra check I installed Xbmc 9.11 on my laptop (2 GB of RAM) and I see the RAM usage builds up to roughly 1,5 GB and periodically falls back, then builds up again to 1,5 GB while pulling in the metadata and stuff. My laptop has been at it a few hours now (I read it can take time, and at least it didn't crash yet...).

Some info:

Code:

[stijn@mnemosyne ~]$ uname -a
Linux mnemosyne 2.6.32-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 15 20:08:25 UTC 2010 i686 Genuine Intel(R) processor 1.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Kernel is 2.6.32.10. The SVN versions have been built with the PKGBUILD available in the AUR. nVidia binary driver is 190.53 (official Arch Linux package).

Code:

[stijn@mnemosyne ~]# pacman -Q xbmc
xbmc 9.11-11

Debug log

Code:

[stijn@mnemosyne ~]# pacman -Q xbmc-svn
xbmc-svn r28256-1

Debug log

For now, the plan is to update the whole thing on my laptop and move the metadata to the AppleTV after that. But that's a bit tedious in the long run.

[.:B:.]

I guess I have an update. I have done away with MediaTomb and set up NFS to share my stuff, and when I have Xbmc scan this RAM usage is normal. So I did find a workaround, but I guess there's something wrong with how UPnP shares get indexed by Xbmc...