Tvheadend

I run TVHeadEnd under Debian Wheezy with the TBS6985 and have never used anything other than the official TBS drivers from http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/ and the only "problem" I've had is the need to recompile the drivers after every kernel update, which is just an annoyance more than a problem. What advantages were the open source drivers supposed to have, other than simply the fact that they are open source? In any case it appears those drivers haven't been updated in a couple of years, whereas the official TBS drivers are updated fairly regularly (I think the last one was about a month ago). So if I were you I'd stick with the official TBS drivers, unless you are really trying to make some statement about preferring open source.

By the way the TBS6985 has been superseded by the TBS6905 and on that one you will definitely want the official TBS drivers. But if by chance you manage to get your hands on a TBS6985, then make sure it's not sharing an IRQ with anything else (see https://freetoairamerica.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/do-you-run-one-or-more-tbs-pcie-cards-under-linux-check-your-irqs/). This does not appear to be an issue with the newer card, at least in my experience.

for TBS CrazyCat drivers
https://bitbucket.org/CrazyCat/linux-tbs-drivers/

problem after kernel update is a missing rule on drivers
with automatically rebuild them
as in vmware drivers

for IRQ there is irqbalance
http://serverfault.com/questions/380935/how-to-ban-hardware-interrupts-with-irqbalance-banned-cpus-on-ubuntu

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the quick replies...

As it happens I was already aware of the IRQ issue, I had to jump through that hoop a couple of years ago when I built my current system.

It sounds like the original "driver" problem has "gone away", I'll try the TBS ones for starters.

If you're interested you can read about the whole shenanigans back in 2013 here: [[https://tvheadend.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/tbs-6981-debacle/]]

Thanks again for your time!

Andy B.