Player Thread is not woken after period elapsed

Nallasellan, Singaravelan
2011-09-05T17:39:07Z

Hi,

When I tried to root cause a glitch in the audio playback, I found a weird behavior.

User thread which invokes the writei function which in turn invokes a kernel function which waits for the free buffer to write the audio data. This kernel function adds this thread to a wake(sleep) queue and calls a schedule_timeout (msecs_to_jiffies(10000)).

When the audio playback of a period is completed, the hardware generates an interrupt. The handler in the path wake_up the thread added to the sleep queue. Most of the time, the playback thread is woken up.

During this error case, the thread is not getting woken up. However the sleep queue is not empty. This continues until the playback enter into underrun due to all the periods in the buffer are played back. Audio playback continues after recovery from xrun.

Will you provide some hint on how to go about identifying the root cause?

Thanks
-Sing