[linux-audio-user] Kernels, and disk I/O

[Anahata]

Hi

While all the excited chat is about the shiny new kernel 2.6.0, 
I have a 2.4.x question:

I used 2.4.18 until recently, when I found that a disk I/O scheduling 
problem (lack of responsiveness while writing backups to an optical
disk) was solved by upgrading to 2.4.20. Now I find that recording
audio on 2.4.20 is useless, with long droputs in the recorded sound.
I'm sure this is related to the way the system periodically dozes off for
a few seconds (not echoing console input) while it does some
disk intensive work. Rebooting 2.4.18 restored audio sanity, fortunately.

The kernel has no low-latency patches applied.
The sound system is M-Audio DIO2448 + OSS drivers
Hard disk is standard IDE, tuned with hdparm
Distro is Debian 3.0 with quite a lot of "testing" packages installed.
Base H/W 800MHz Duron + 256M RAM.

This does seem to be related to the disk I/O scheduling change, or
possibly virtual memory

Is there a kernel guru who can advise?
Possible options seem to be:
1. Apply low latency patches
2. Upgrade to 2.4.22
3. Upgrade to 2.6.0
4. something else?

-- 
Anahata
anahata at treewind.co.uk       Tel: 01638 720444
http://www.treewind.co.uk    Mob: 07976 263827