[linux-audio-dev] Re: [announce] [patch] Voluntary Kernel Preemption Patch

[Florian Schmidt]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 20:32:37 -0400
Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:

> 
> Yes, this is important.  One problem I had recently with the Via EPIA
> board was that unless 2D acceleration was disabled by setting 'Option
> "NoAccel"' in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, overloading the X server would
> cause interrupts from the soundcard to be completely disabled for tens
> of milliseconds.  Users should keep in mind that by using 2D or 3D
> hardware acceleration in X, you are allowing the X server to directly
> access hardware, which can have very bad results if the driver is
> buggy.  I am not sure the kernel can do anything about this.

Hi,

interesting that you mention the Xserver. I use a dual graphics card setup atm [Nvidia GF3 TI and some matrox pci card]. The nvidia card seems to work flawlessly even with HW accelleration [i use nvidias evil binary only drivers]. The matrox card OTH disturbs the soundcard severely. Whenever i have activity on my second monitor i get sound artefacts in jack's output [no cracklling, it's rather as if the volume is set to 0 for short moments and then back to normal]. There's a certain chance that this artefact produces an xrun. I suppose it's because the card is on the pci bus.

I figured it's maybe an irq issue problem, but whatever slot i put the gfx card in - it made no difference [btw: how do i find out which resources this card uses? it is not shown by /proc/interrupts]. I also tried putting the soundcard in many different slots to maybe get it on higher prio irq, but it always gets irq 5 [according to /proc/interrupts]..

Should i try a different 2nd gfx card? Should i avoid pci gfx cards at all costs? Will i just have to live w/o second monitor?  How do i find out which hw resources X is really using?

Florian Schmidt
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