I've posted about this problem earlier on the Alsa lists, but
Takashi Iwai has suggested I post here, since he thinks this is
a kernel issue.
There seems to be a problem with Alsa when running on the AMD64
architecture on motherboards with the Via K8T800 chipset. The sound
is highly irregular, with lots of drop-outs, but also speed-ups,
slow-downs and weird volume changes.
I've got this problem on an Asus K8V SE motherboard. Rod Smith
has the same problem on an MSI Neo-FSR.
(http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22asus+k8v%22+alsa&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&selm=1et59c-90v.ln%40speaker.rodsbooks.com&rnum=4)
In that post, Rod thought the problem was the Alsa driver for the
on-board sound (VIA VT8237), but this is not the case, as I've installed
a PCI Trident 4DWave NX, and it shows exactly the same behavior.
The problem appears not to be in the low level driver code.
The degree of the problem is highly sensitive to the load on the
CPU at the time. Games like bumprace, which use multiple threads
and never sleep (giving load values around 8), sound awful. Most
games like tuxkart, which keep the load under 1, sound perfectly fine.
And yet, some things sound bad even when the CPU isn't loaded.
timidity++ is a good example.
This happens with both 64 and 32 bit kernels, and no amount of
twiddling with kernel parameters (ACPI/CPU frequency scaling, apic,
preemption, etc.) seems to make any difference.
Can anyone here offer a suggestion?
(Currently, I'm running 2.6 series kernels. I haven't yet tried
older versions.)
Eric
I have the same problem...
My system is a AMD64 3200+, motherboard MSI K8T-Neo with on-board sound
VIA VT8237.
I'm running kernel 2.6.9.
Olavo D'Antonio
Eric Sharkey wrote:
> I've posted about this problem earlier on the Alsa lists, but
> Takashi Iwai has suggested I post here, since he thinks this is
> a kernel issue.
>
>
> There seems to be a problem with Alsa when running on the AMD64
> architecture on motherboards with the Via K8T800 chipset. The sound
> is highly irregular, with lots of drop-outs, but also speed-ups,
> slow-downs and weird volume changes.
>
> I've got this problem on an Asus K8V SE motherboard. Rod Smith
> has the same problem on an MSI Neo-FSR.
> (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22asus+k8v%22+alsa&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&selm=1et59c-90v.ln%40speaker.rodsbooks.com&rnum=4)
>
> In that post, Rod thought the problem was the Alsa driver for the
> on-board sound (VIA VT8237), but this is not the case, as I've installed
> a PCI Trident 4DWave NX, and it shows exactly the same behavior.
> The problem appears not to be in the low level driver code.
>
> The degree of the problem is highly sensitive to the load on the
> CPU at the time. Games like bumprace, which use multiple threads
> and never sleep (giving load values around 8), sound awful. Most
> games like tuxkart, which keep the load under 1, sound perfectly fine.
>
> And yet, some things sound bad even when the CPU isn't loaded.
> timidity++ is a good example.
>
> This happens with both 64 and 32 bit kernels, and no amount of
> twiddling with kernel parameters (ACPI/CPU frequency scaling, apic,
> preemption, etc.) seems to make any difference.
>
> Can anyone here offer a suggestion?
>
> (Currently, I'm running 2.6 series kernels. I haven't yet tried
> older versions.)
>
> Eric
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to [email protected]
> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>
>
Lee Revell wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 14:32 -0200, Olavo B D'Antonio wrote:
>
>>I have the same problem...
>>
>>My system is a AMD64 3200+, motherboard MSI K8T-Neo with on-board sound
>>VIA VT8237.
>>
>>I'm running kernel 2.6.9.
>
>
> This may have already been covered on the alsa list, but...
>
> Have any of you tried the OSS drivers?
>
> Lee
>
>
>
I know that topic fits Alsa list, but I just posted here because they
(alsa list) suggested to post here...
No.. I didn't try OSS drivers.
Another thing: here the Alsa driver uses OSS compatibility modules.
Olavo D'Antonio
On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 14:32 -0200, Olavo B D'Antonio wrote:
> I have the same problem...
>
> My system is a AMD64 3200+, motherboard MSI K8T-Neo with on-board sound
> VIA VT8237.
>
> I'm running kernel 2.6.9.
This may have already been covered on the alsa list, but...
Have any of you tried the OSS drivers?
Lee
I am using AMD 3400+ with fedora core -3 (alsa 1.0.6) .
It seems to be fine for me.
-surya
On Wed Nov 24 11:18 , Olavo B D'Antonio <[email protected]> sent:
>Lee Revell wrote:
>> On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 14:32 -0200, Olavo B D'Antonio wrote:
>>
>>>I have the same problem...
>>>
>>>My system is a AMD64 3200+, motherboard MSI K8T-Neo with on-board sound
>>>VIA VT8237.
>>>
>>>I'm running kernel 2.6.9.
>>
>>
>> This may have already been covered on the alsa list, but...
>>
>> Have any of you tried the OSS drivers?
>>
>> Lee
>>
>>
>>
>
>I know that topic fits Alsa list, but I just posted here because they
>(alsa list) suggested to post here...
>
>No.. I didn't try OSS drivers.
>
>Another thing: here the Alsa driver uses OSS compatibility modules.
>
>Olavo D'Antonio
>-
>To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
>the body of a message to [email protected]
>More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
On Wed Nov 24 2004 - 14:51:22 EST surya wrote:
> I am using AMD 3400+ with fedora core -3 (alsa 1.0.6) .
> It seems to be fine for me.
The motherboard chipset is very important. Do you have a Via K8T800
based motherboard? These are the only ones that seem to be affected
by this.
Eric
Eric Sharkey <[email protected]> wrote:
> There seems to be a problem with Alsa when running on the AMD64
> architecture on motherboards with the Via K8T800 chipset. The sound
> is highly irregular, with lots of drop-outs, but also speed-ups,
> slow-downs and weird volume changes.
While using the in-kernel Alsa, my ens1371 based Soundblaster behaved
the same way, but with the seperate Alsa modules (1.0.6a from Debian
unstable) the blopping, crackling etc. is far less present, but still
audible in some cases, mostly disk I/O.
(Kernel 2.6.9 with staircase 9.1, Abit KV8 Pro, AMD64 3200+)
Gr??e,
S?
On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 14:36:48 EST Lee Revell wrote:
> This may have already been covered on the alsa list, but...
>
> Have any of you tried the OSS drivers?
I've just tried the OSS Trident driver. It sounds different.
I'm still getting noticable audio dropouts in bumprace. Timidity
sounds ok, now. Other apps sound, oh, I don't know, scratchy is the
best word, I guess. It's almost as if the dropouts are occuring
more frequently (much more frequently) but with shorter duration,
making it sound like scratchy sound rather than sound with punctuated
silence as it did under Alsa.
Maybe some sort of interrupt handling problem not getting the bits
where they need to be at the right time?
Eric