FC5 slow saves to network locations
FC5 (FedoraCore) users have been experiencing extremely slow saves of certain XSI scenes to network drives mounted through NFS. We have been able to reproduce this problem in-house. While it does not appear to be documented anywhere, Redhat seems to have addressed this issue in the latest Fedora Core 5 kernel images. By simply upgrading to this kernel and installing the corresponding video drivers this problem was immediately solved.
In particular, for our FC5 system where we could reproduce the problem the kernel package that was originally being used was
kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2257.fc5
The problem was fixed by upgrading to the kernel package
kernel-smp-2.6.20-1.2319.fc5.i686.rpm
available at http://redhat.download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/i386/. We also upgraded the nVidia video card driver packages to
kmod-nvidia-96xx-smp-1.0.9631-4.2.6.20_1.2319.fc5.i686.rpm xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx-1.0.9631-5.lvn5.i386.rpm
They were both obtained from http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/5/i386/, the download mirror of http://rpm.livna.org.
We HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you do NOT uninstall your previous kernel version; the new kernel package will automatically be installed as the default kernel, and there is no harm in leaving the old kernel version there to be manually selected at bootup if ever needed.
Note also that in our particular case it was necessary to power-cycle the machine after installing the new kernel version; the soft-reboot done by Linux itself caused the machine to hang soon after booting the new kernel. By power-cycling the machine it was able to boot correctly. This is likely a specific problem for our hardware but in case you experience the same hang after installing the new kernel it is worth trying a power-cycle before reverting to the old kernel.
