Re: Is anything being done re: the pcm timeout issue?

Conrad J. Sabatier said:
> 

> 
> No, no vchans in use here.  My main audio app is madplay, which I run
> from a little "jukebox" script I wrote to play my MP3s.

Ok, I've looked a bit at madplay and it looks like sound is very different in 5.3-current.  (Yes, I know about the device change in the kernel).  I haven't had a chance to test this out yet in 5.3 because I've been focusing on some other issues - mainly GIANT's which are killing performance for me in 5.2.

I'm going to load this up on my laptop tomorrow and see if I can cause this to break in any conceivable way for me.  I have a dual opteron system I can play with in my lab, but I'm afraid that this one doesn't have sound on it.

> 
> I've been unable to determine what's triggering the breakage myself.
> The script runs fine for a while, selecting random MP3 files and
> running madplay to play them one by one.  Suddenly, madplay will output the
> message "output: write failed" (or something like that) and my system log
> will show "pcm0:play:0: play interrupt timeout, channel dead".
> 
> After that, any further attempts to play a sound file of any sort result
> in only a split-second of sound followed by the same messages as above. The
> only cure is a reboot.
> 
> I posted some truss output from madplay a while back, but it's probably
> not very useful, since a timeout had already occurred in a previous run, so
> the listing only showed what was happening once the device had already
> become broken.
> 
> Catching it "in the act", so to speak, is tricky, as it may work fine
> for an hour or two before the first breakage occurs.  This would require a
> HUGE amount of truss or ktrace logging.
> 
> 
> We had a discussion recently here about certain peculiarities in the
> sound code, but never reached any useful conclusions, and none of our sound
> experts ever joined in, either.

Yeah, I noticed that too.  Wasn't sure though, since I just recently joined the list.

> 
> I would hate to see 5.3 released with this problem still unsolved, but
> it's beginning to look like that may, in fact, be the case, unfortunately.
> I had hoped, too, that by this time we would have seen
> the new MIDI code incorporated into the tree as well, but it seems that 
> sound (other than the abrupt yanking of the previous MIDI code and the
> recent renaming of devices/drivers) is being sadly neglected lately.

Well, let's get testing and breaking, then.


Rusty Nejdl