Re: sound issues in -CURRENT

Eirik Oeverby wrote:

> Hoi,
>
> I have all debugging and witness stuff disabled, though I am using 
> SCHED_ULE. Apart from that, the problem seems to be somewhat less 
> evident when playing from the network (no playback-related disk i/o), 
> but it only reduces the problem - it does not eliminate it.
>
> As I have stated earlier, the problem gets worse over time. After a 
> clean reboot (even though all the apps I use are started and running), 
> the problem shows up once every few minutes. Now, after a couple of 
> days uptime, it happens a few times per minute - enough to annoy me 
> ever so slightly when trying to tap the rhytm with my foot ;)
>
> My HDD is running in ATA-100 mode (no PIO) and is reasonably fast. 
> FreeBSD 4.9 works perfectly on the same machine, with all the same 
> software.
>
> /Eirik
>
> Pav Lucistnik wrote:
>
>> V út, 23. 03. 2004 v 09:26, Søren Schmidt píše:
>>
>>
>>>> Heavy disk I/O seems to be a trigger for the problem. I always hear 
>>>> the
>>>> screwups, but i.e. when building mozilla or openoffice (during the
>>>> extract phase with heavy I/O), sound almost slows down to a complete
>>>> stop, stutters and hicks and cracks all the time - to a point where 
>>>> the
>>>> music is almost impossible to even identify anymore.
>>>
>>
>>
>>> I think you are suffering from the high interrupt latency in -current,
>>> this combined with a soundcard with a small buffer would easily lead 
>>> to your problems. A slow disk or PIO mode could also be troublesome 
>>> in some cases. You do have witness etc turned off right ?
>>
>>
>>
>> I hear this too, on both my cards (Soundblaster 128 and onboard AC97
>> codec). I have all possible debugging turned off. Heavy disc activity
>> like untarring triggers the symptoms, which sounds like buffer underruns
>> on the soundcard. Almost sounds like a new ATA stack is really effective
>> (leaving little CPU cycles for feeding data to soundcard).
>>
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I have had this problem before myself.  It would happen to me under 
load, but not that often.  Usaully I'd be cvsuping, streaming or playing 
music, and I do a lot of compiling because I like to keep things up to 
date.  I think I may have first noticied it on current before 5.2.1 with 
the switch to sched_ule.  I have since added the patch to ule that had 
been cirrculating on the current mailing list before it was commited.  
It may have speed some things up, but I have yet to notice any skipping 
or sound problems in xmms.  I will but some load on the system while 
streaming, but a week or less without problems is too soon to tell.  At 
least I think it might be.

Jason