sndconfig.. and something chewing up resources

sndconfig.. and something chewing up resources

[Josh Estelle]

I recently reinstalled my whole system, using RedHat 6.2.

In past installs I have always recompiled my kernel to gain sound card
support for my Crystal Audio card.  This time I had heard about this
until 'sndconfig' that came with RedHat so I decided to try it.  It
worked slickly and now I've got sound.  But it appears to be doing sound
using some daemons of sorts, ksoundaemon, esd?, kaudio, something like
those... and it seems when I run anythign else that is at all processor
intensive my sound playback gets coppy or drops out and does funny
stuff.  I figure I'm just going to recompile my kernel and do it the old
way and see if the problem persists.  Anyone have any ideas on what's
going on?

My machine is a Dell Optiplex, 400mhz, 128MB ram..

Josh


-- 

"You can be my Yoko Ono... You can follow me wherever I go..."

 - Barenaked Ladies

Re: sndconfig.. and something chewing up resources

[Benno Senoner]

You may be right,
the problem is that esd uses too small buffers and doesn't run SCHED_FIFO
therefore high CUP/disk load can cause this kind of drouputs.

( try to grep for esd while you are playing sound, to see if it is running)

Anyway a kernel recompile won't help because it's not the kernel the
source of the problem.
(sndconfig just insmods the audio drivers, nothing magic :-) )

The problem is very probably the soundserver.

What kind of audio app are you running ?
As far I can tell you I run RH 6.2 and KDE here, and only mpg123 uses esd as
default.  xmms does direct /dev/dsp output except if you spefify esd in the
settings.

Plus try to tune your IDE harddisk with 
hdparm -d 1 -c 1 -u 1 /dev/hda (except if it's a crappy old IDE disk)

it helps alot, especially when doing disk I/O.

Benno.



On Wed, 03 May 2000, Josh Estelle wrote:
> I recently reinstalled my whole system, using RedHat 6.2.
> 
> In past installs I have always recompiled my kernel to gain sound card
> support for my Crystal Audio card.  This time I had heard about this
> until 'sndconfig' that came with RedHat so I decided to try it.  It
> worked slickly and now I've got sound.  But it appears to be doing sound
> using some daemons of sorts, ksoundaemon, esd?, kaudio, something like
> those... and it seems when I run anythign else that is at all processor
> intensive my sound playback gets coppy or drops out and does funny
> stuff.  I figure I'm just going to recompile my kernel and do it the old
> way and see if the problem persists.  Anyone have any ideas on what's
> going on?
> 
> My machine is a Dell Optiplex, 400mhz, 128MB ram..
> 
> Josh
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> "You can be my Yoko Ono... You can follow me wherever I go..."
> 
>  - Barenaked Ladies