Re: i810 audio doesn't work with 2.4.9

Doug Ledford
2001-08-23T14:01:24Z

Andris Pavenis wrote:

> Got incremental diffs between ac versions since 2.4.5.
> Applied all diffs to 2.4.5 version of i810_audio.c except one between 2.4.6-ac1 and 2.4.6-ac2
> As result i810 audio seems to work

Can you send me that incremental patch you left out. I would like to
look at it to see what's going on.

> So it seems that update of i810_audio.c between 2.4.6-ac1 and ac2 breaks it (at least for me).
> But I think it still eating too much time (about 2-3% on PIII 700) when I'm not doing anything
> with sound but no more up to 90% as with unmodified version from 2.4.9 (maybe it's a problem
> of artsd , I don't know)

Yes, it's a problem of artsd. Someone decided (presumably to avoid the
occasional pop/click from the startup or shutdown of the sound device)
to make artsd transmit silence over the sound card when no sounds
currently need played. From my perspective, I will *NEVER* use artsd as
long as it does this. I find it so extremely stupid and insane to a
level that can't be measured that I refuse to run that software. I
absolutely will not have my systems PCI bus loaded down with a constant
data transfer when there is no sound to be played. Right now, that's
possibly something as small as a 48KHz/16bit data stream. But what if
the system is upgraded to an ac3 5.1 digital system. Then you would
have something like 384KByte/s of data to transfer over the PCI bus just
for frickin silence. Won't ever happen on any machine I use. Anyone
trying to do things like disk benchmarks on a system that runs artsd may
be suprised to find their performance is actually negatively impacted
just by having that horrible sound daemon running. Furthermore, I find
their use of the sound API to be suboptimal, especially when they are
going to transmit silence all the time. I am *FAR* happier with the way
esd actually handles its interaction with the sound card (other issues
are a different matter, I don't rightly know which one does better sound
sample upconversion for instance).

--

Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com> http://people.redhat.com/dledford
Please check my web site for aic7xxx updates/answers before
e-mailing me about problems