[LAU] Audio Performance on a Thinkpad R60 /w HDA

[Spencer Russell]

Hey List,
Just thought I'd let the list know how my new thinkpad is doing. I was
worried when /proc/interrupts showed my HDA card on the same interrupt
as one of my USB controllers and the firewire controller, especially
when I was getting crazy xruns even at high latencies like 2x1024.
Then I found a handy post from mlesswing on the Ardour forums. Turns
out that i just added

options snd-hda-intel index=0 position_fix=1

to my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file, and low and behold I can get
xrun-free performance at 2x64 (2.9ms latency at 44100!!)

I haven't seen how running a firewire drive at the same time might
effect performance, so we'll see if the IRQs end up being a problem.

Overall, about 24 hours after I received it at my door I'm really
happy with the Linux performance. I know people have had a lot of
trouble with HDA in the past, and I'm not sure how well known this fix
is, but hopefully it can help somebody.

-spencer