After a lot of experimenting, I thought I'd post some info for anyone that has one of these boards:

- the linux-2.6.21-rc6-mm1 kernel patch contains code to support this specific processor. It makes a noticeable difference in performance because of proper cache alignment.

- that same kernel patch also has the ivtv drivers merged into the kernel. This is long overdue.

- Hauppauge has allowed their firmware to be repackaged. So if you have one of those cards and you're using the kernel with the new ivtv driver, you'll need to download the new firmware from http://ivtvdriver.org

- I ran into some errors where ivtv was unable to load the card's firmware. This appears to be a problem with udev on the unstable Debian branch. I don't really have more info than that, unfortunately. As a workaround, I did:

apt-get install hotplug

which uninstalls udev (the hotplug package is deprecated and udev is the replacement, but if udev is broken...)

Anyhow if you've been waiting for proper support for your VIA board, this is the patch you want to look at. Hope that helps out.

I hate to sound stupid but i'm new to this
Iwas wondering how would one go about getting or installing the linux-2.6.21-rc6-mm1 kernel mentioned in the previous posting.
Thanks
Aidan

The official 2.6.21 kernel is available now. I haven't double-checked yet to verify if the VIA patches made it into the official tree but I'll post here again after I take a look.