Re: RE: Oops in latest CVS

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Sun, 30 Nov 2003 11:28:04 -0500,
David Ronis wrote:
> 
> --text follows this line--
> 
> I've been complaining for several months about Oops's, lockups, etc.,
> on my Sony Viao Z5050S laptop.  Sometimes I would simply freeze,
> sometimes I got an oops (several of which have been posted), and last
> week, I actually got some sound, albeit very corrupted.
> 
> Last night I did a CVS update, rebuilt and installed, and promptly
> froze when I tried to use sound.  (I have things set up to have the
> modules loaded and unloaded automatically).  I was in X (gnome), and a
> second USB mouse installed, and a PCMCI modem card plugged in.
> 
> After unplugging all the add-in devices and rebooting, I decided to
> give alsa another try, hoping at least to get the poor-quality sound I
> had in the last version or perhaps an oops.  To my suprise it worked
> PERFECTLY!  What was different, is that I tried alsa before plugging
> any of the other devices in and before starting X.  Moreover, once
> alsa's modules were installed, everything else could be installed and
> the system seems stable.
> 
> Could the problem may have something to do with the fact that IRQ9
> is shared on this machine?  Here's what /proc/interrupts says:
> 
>   9:      72787          XT-PIC  Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c475, eth0, usb-uhci, NM256AV
> 
> I've copied the output of lshw below.  You'll notice lots of things use IRQ9.
> 
> Any suggestions?

the combination of USB and this chip is really bad, especially when
USB device is not initialized.  this will issue unprocessed
interrupts.
also, starting ALSA nm256 driver after X is problematic, too, since X
will break the video RAM area, which is shared with the sound driver
as a sound buffer.
hence,  USB -> ALSA -> X would the best order of initialization, i
guess.


Takashi


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