Sound-related hard-locking

Sound-related hard-locking

[J. Solomon Kostelnik]

I've been having a problem with DOSEMU causing my machine to hardlock
when using sound.  At first I thought it was only caused by using sound
in DOSEMU.  But last night the same thing happened when I was playing an
MP3 with XMMS and then booted XDOS (without midid running).

As soon as the XDOS window opened, my machine hard-locked.  No mouse, no
keyboard, music stopped, etc.  Hard reset needed.

Previously, this was happening with certain DOS games using MIDI music,
such as "The Sword of Shannara."  If I loaded midid, then opened XDOS,
then ran this game, when the MIDI music was supposed to start playing,
my machine would hard lock.  However, midid works just fine with another
DOS game, Ascendency, so I don't know what's different between the two.

Specs: Toshiba PII-400 Laptop, 192mb ram + 225mb swap, Mandrake Linux
8.2 w/ vanilla 2.4.18 kernel, Gnome 1.2.4 with sawfish, dosemu 1.1.3.7
with all the "experimental patches" applied.  Sound card is a ESS ES1978
Maestro 2E.

Is there a way I can log this before it crashes and get any meaningful
data before it happens?  If not, I've given you all the info I think is
relevant.  Let me know if you need more.

Solomon

Re: Sound-related hard-locking

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

J. Solomon Kostelnik wrote:
> But last night the same thing happened when I was playing an
> MP3 with XMMS and then booted XDOS (without midid running). 
> As soon as the XDOS window opened, my machine hard-locked.
Hmm, doesn't look dosemu-related at a
first glance.

> vanilla 2.4.18 kernel
This may be a problem. Try 2.4.20 as
all the older kernels were easy to
lock up by dosemu, which is now fixed.

> Maestro 2E.
And what about video? It was reported
that xdos crashes X sometimes on some
video boards. Try running console
dosemu and see if the problem is still
there (apply the post-less video patch
at first).

> Is there a way I can log this before it crashes and get any meaningful
> data before it happens?
Try ALSA drivers with OSS emulation.
Maybe it is just an ESS OSS driver buggy
and the current dosemu sound code is
extremely evil to the underlaying drivers
and exposes all of their hidden bugs.
It locks up the Aureal drivers on my
machine after some minutes of playing,
but as that drivers are proprietary, this
can't be fixed.
Another usefull test would be to try
dosemu with a pc-speaker OSS driver. If
the problem goes away by this, then it
is definitely a problem of your OSS driver.
Because even if the dosemu sound code
is buggy, this doesn't excuse a kernel
lock-ups.