Ess Solo-1 interrupt behaviour

Samium Gromoff
2002-02-19T10:22:44Z

I`ve recently spotted that a solo1 pci soundcard generates
16000+ interrupts/second with esd started idling.

What strikes me as odd is that my old good isa sb16 vibra
does only 600+ interrupts.

Also i`ve had some strange experience of this interrupt load
affecting the disk io.
The situation was the next: i`ve had a large transfer to a samba
boxen with this poor solo1 soundcard. I would like to emphasize that i
turn off the drive write-caching ability in order to gain reliability,
and that with write cacheing the following issues are hardly noticeable.
So yes, i was copying large amount of data thru the 10mbit rtl8029s
to the samba box. What i`ve tested are two situations: with esd on ==
effective 16,5k interrupts/second, and with esd off, and thus no interrupts
generated by the solo1 card.
What i`ve noticed quite disappointed me: with esd turned on, the disk
writeout activity (well, the seek activity) was _much_ higher.
Ie i`ve stopped esd, the seekage dropped down, i`ve started esd -
seekage goes back.

So we basically have here two strange issues:
1. Ess Solo-1 driver generates awful lots of interrupts (16k/s)
2. Heavy interrupt load forces the elevator to make bad
decisions

Info: linux-2.4.17-rmap12e, p2-300 128M RAM, rtl8029 NIC, Ess Solo-1 SB

regards, Samium Gromoff