Thanks for the reply, Mark.
I ran Benno's disk latency tests quite a bit when I was setting up my system. As far as I could tell, the test just checks playback, not record. As I mentioned, I have no trouble playing back (in either Duplex or Playback modes) to either disk system. When I was fussing with the early 2.6 kernels, performance with these tests was always worse than with 2.4.23. With the 2.4.23 kernel, tests on the IDE/ATA drive were consistently < 3ms, whereas there were usually a couple >3ms blips with the SCSI Raid0 with the diskwrite and diskcopy stress tests (all other tests were <3ms). When I turned on the write cache on the SCSI drives, the results were like the IDE/ATA, but I got just as many xruns with jackd and ardour. This was one of the observations that made me wonder whether the problem was actually the SCSI controller (i.e., nothing I did to the SCSI system affected the number of xruns).
I haven't tried those latency tests with the 2.6.9 that I have now, primarily because they didn't match up with the "real world" performance that I am concerned with (multitrack recording). This is why I'm hoping the ecasound tests will tell me something.
As for desktop, I'm using openbox - I got fewer xruns with it than with gnome. Never tried KDE, but posts to this list (including yours!) don't encourage me to.
Joel
> It's been quite a while since I've heard of anyone using it, but what
> about running Benno's disk latency testing program on your raid drives
> and see what happens?
>
> Or does that no longer work with 2.6 kernels?
>
> When I worked with the tool it gave me very reasonable numbers vs.
> what I was seeing for xruns.
>
> Also, I don't think I remember you mentioning what desktop environment
> you are using, but even with my 2.6.9-rc2-mm4 type kernel I got lots
> of xruns under KDE, while Gnome was much better and fluxbox was, for
> me, the best. (measurably...)
On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 04:37:17 +0200, Florian Schmidt <mista.tapas(a)gmx.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:01:30 -0400
> Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote:
>
> > > The only 3 xruns happened right when I started the kernel compile.
> > >
> > > This is 2.6.9-rc2-mm4-VP-S7
> > >
> >
> > There is absolutely _no way_ that these are kernel-induced. The period
> > time is 5ms!!! This kernel should _never_ produce an delay of more than
> > 200 usecs. This _has_ to be flaky hardware, or a bug in jackd or in
> > your clients. What happens if you run jackd with no clients?
>
> Hi,
>
> the kernel does weird things nowadays. I do not get any satisfactory results
> with either S8 or S9. I get xruns all over the place [under loads much
> lighter than a kernel compilation] although the VP and related settings are
> as always. T1 is working smoothly again. I have no idea what caused this
> behaviour in S8 and S9. But it feels like a scheduler problem. X11 is much
> more jumpy under these kernels and load, too than under S7 and T1
>
> So, i would still expect some weirdnesses in VP enabled kernels, since they
> are based on the mm tree [which might hold many surprises in itself].
>
> But anyways, back to Mark.
>
> I talked to Mark on irc and he seems to have had SMP enabled on a UP system
> [p4 mobile w/o HT according to mark]. OTOH this worked fine on fedora,
> right? Also this is a notebook, maybe power saving features play a role.
>
> One more thing to note. His gentoo system uses a linuxthreads glibc. The
> same hardware and kernels are working very nicely on his fedora core system
> with CCRMA and VP kernels.
>
> I suspect some weird interplay of a linuxthreads self built glibc and a
> 2.6.x kernel, especially wrt to SCHED_FIFO scheduling.
>
> One more thing:
>
> The setups between fedora core and gentoo might differ in what default
> services run. Do you [Mark] have any powermanagement daemons loaded? cpu
> frequency scaling, etc? I know only little about these issues, since i
> basically do not use power management.
>
> The two things i would recommend to try would be:
>
> 1] Build a very very barebone kernel for, let's say, 386 architecture. no
> acpi no apm, no usb [if possible], no smp, local APIC if he likes. Only
> those devices really needed, no dri, etc [but of course with the usual set
> of VP features enabled].
>
> 2] try a gentoo system with a nptl enabled glibc. Either build one, or maybe
> get some live cd based on gentoo which fulfills the requirements. See if the
> problems persist. Or try some third distribution with nptl libc and slap a
> VP kernel on it. If it works fine, your gentoo system is b0rk3n in some way.
>
> flo
>
> p.s. which jack version btw?
>
Hi all,
OK, Last evening and this morning I have made good headway. It
appears that the main culprit was ACPI support, or some part of it.
With most of the ACPI stuff now disabled in the kernel build I am able
to run jack with no clients attached, as a root or user with the lsm
module modprobed, at p=8, n=2 for over 1 hour with no xruns. If my
calculations are correct this would be a latency of less than 0.5mS!
My current kernel is 2.6.9-rc2-mm4-VP-S7-lsm-UMP-noACPI:
- 2.6.8 from kernel.org
- 2.6.9-rc2 patch
- 2.6.9-rc2-mm4 patch
- voluntary_premption-S7 patch
- realtime-lsm patch
I've built it with most everything I can find that I do not
absolutely need turned off. I'm non-SMP, ACPI mostly gone, and who
knows what else along the way. I'll send the .config file to whoever
might need it. I am then running the sound card and CDROM interrupts
non-threaded and everything else is threaded.
In terms of better testing I now need to concentrate on finding an
application that run without creating xruns within the application
itself. At higher latency values (p=256 for instance) alsaplayer -r -o
jack runs pretty well, but as I move to lower latencies I find that
alsaplayer deterministically creates xruns at the transistion between
every song on a CD. I also tried alsaplayer playing wave files from
disk, but I see xruns as it goes from one file to the next also.
I want to try using chrt to see if alsaplayer is really getting
real-time access, etc. Maybe there are things still not right with the
way I'm running it on my box.
Is there any other simple app that could play a wave file from, for
instance, memory without this sort of problem?
I'll certainly be trying out Ardour as a bigger test once I'm more
confident of the disk access issues in real-time. I think that 1394
support may not be in good shape in this kernel yet.
So, the good news is my Gentoo system is not broken, and that I've
hopefully learned a bit and contributed just a little bit more along
the way. That said I still have a long ways to go.
Cheers,
Mark
derek holzer:
> > broken. This should be as easy as "File -> Open Append" and select all
> > the files. Even easier than catting them all together.
>
> Maybe you can tell me which app isn't horribly broken, then. I can't see
> this "open append" feature in either Rezound or Audacity. Espc Rezound
> is clumsy for this, because it has to visually render all the peaks.
> Each 50 min chunk warns it will take 4 minutes to load this way!
>
SND, http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/snd.html
Start it, and paste the following into the terminal:
(add-to-menu edit-menu "Append file"
(lambda ()
(select-file
(lambda (filename)
(insert-sound filename (frames))))))
(I could have reccomend snd-ls, which is distribution of snd
that have already configured append-file
(http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src/), but unfortunately, that
function seems to be broken there.)
--
http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src/
Snd-ls 0.9.1.1 changes:
0.9.1 -> 0.9.1.1:
-Fixed Append File edit-menu option.
-Workaround for trouble with ladspa default settings.
Sono 0.2 changes:
Some very few small changes to make it compile with linux again. Used some
code from the port for Redhat 6 in 2000 by Roger Klaveness.
Snd-ls
-------
Snd-ls is a distribution of the sound editor Snd. Its target is
people that don't know scheme very well, and don't want
to spend too much time configuring Snd. It can also serve
as a quick introduction to Snd and how it can be set up.
SONO - MAKES A PRESENTABLE SCORE FROM YOUR ELECTROACOUSTIC PIECE
----------------------------------------------------------------
This little program takes a soundfile of any length and writes a
Postscript file with a 'score', including sonogram and oscillogram. This
can be printed directly on your laser. Sono was written for SGI computers.
--
Guys,
I'm sorry for the long post. Your help to recover my system is much
appreciated.
My HP PC came with one 40 Gb hard disk with 2 primary partitions inside. The
first one is a hidden partition meant for recovery, in a propietary format.
It's size is something like 3-4 Gb. The second one is a NTFS partition
taking the remainder of the disk, which contains a preconfigured XP Home
Edition including applications. After some resizing and tinkering, I managed
to repartition and keep my XP, as follows:
/dev/hda1, 1-348, 2630848+, 12 (Compaq Diags)
/dev/hda2, 349-2001, 12496680, 7 (HPFS/NTFS)
/dev/hda3, 2002-4282, 17244360, 83 (Linux)
/dev/hda4, 4283-5174, 6743520, 5 (Extended)
/dev/hda5, 4283-5103, 6206759+, b (W95 FAT32)
/dev/hda6, 5104-5174, 536759+, 82 (Linux Swap)
(As you can see, I had to create my swap partition inside an extended
partition. Not sure if that's a performance penalty compared to a primary
but I ran out of primaries and I wanted to have some shared space between XP
and Linux, hence the FAT32 partition that both can read from and write to.)
Next I installed Redhat 9, which installed Grub as part of the installation
process. Not sure where Grub resided, as I just followed the default
installation because I know nothing about Grub and the way it works (I'm
used to Lilo, but thought that if Grub is the default, well I guess it must
be better). After installation only the Linux partition would appear in the
boot menu, so I edited the Grub configuration and added the XP partition.
after that everything was perfect, and I could boot either. The boot menu
has a nice graphic interface.
Recently, I decided to switch from Redhat to A/Demudi, and I installed
Demudi 1.2.0 beta (the final stable release had not come out yet and this
was the first music distro ever to feature an integrated installation for OS
+ music stuff). In this case, the installation even added the XP partition
the the Grub menu, so it appears in the boot menu. In this case, the boot
menu has a more conventional text interface, but both are the same Grub
software I guess. Again I don't have a clue where Grub resides, and I was
not even informed / asked during installation if I remember well!
The thing now is that Demudi boots fine but either Grub or the partitioning
software that the install process runs must have done something nasty
somewhere. When I select Win XP, the HP recovery software triggers, which
would restore the original partitions (2 primaries, the recovery / hidden
one and the big NTFS one for XP) if it wasn't because now this software
crashes with an error message, halting the machine. (I have screwed up XP in
the past, making this recovery software trigger and restore the partitions
and software and it used to work.) HP's solution to this problem is to get
from them this same recovery software, this time in the form of a CD, to
restore the whole hard disk. From there, I would start repartitioning again.
My problem is, even if I do that, I'm afraid that installing Demudi will
screw up the whole thing again, so no real gain there. So I'm thinking that
I could probably try to tell Grub to back up whatever I used to have in my
hard disk and see what happens? (Although I'm not sure wether the problem
was created by Grub or the install software.) The other thing maybe worth
trying is to get this recovery CD in the hope that it will create a big XP
partition only with no recovery partition. Then I could have all primaries,
with a more conventional scheme which would be less confusing for whatever
Linux installation software.
So what do you think? What software is the culprit? Grub or otherwise? Where
does Grub live? Is it a good idea to tell Grub to back up? Any of you with
PCs featuring this kind of recovery systems? Any problems with them? I
should mention that all my data is safe in backups, so it's just a matter of
configuring a clean machine (I'm keen to reinstall XP and / or Demudi).
Thank you very much.
Cheers,
Alex
_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar - get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.com/
Dear All,
Following the tradition of sndpeek, rt_lpc does LPC analysis,
synthesis, and visualization in real-time. It is released as of
today.
features:
- real-time LPC analysis
- real-time LPC synthesis
- visualization of original, predicted, and error waveforms
- visualization of vocal tract shape from LPC coefficients
- adjustable LPC analysis order
- adjustable synthesis pitch shift
- lots of other choices (pitch pulse source selection, emphasis
filter)\\
- STFT plot
- modular LPC library
- MIDI input control of pitch
Like sndpeek, it is great for teaching.
http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/software/rt_lpc/
We just put this out, and while the main file is pretty cluttered,
our LPC library is cleanly abstracted for use in your applications.
Welcome all comments and suggestions.
Best,
Ge!
Hi,
I'm doing a small concert in Cologne, Germany, on Thursday, 28. Oct.
04, 19:00 (7pm) at the Cleanicum, Brüsseler Str. 74/76.
This is part of the vernissage of an exhibition with photographs by my
friend Rainer Rehfeld (http://www.rehfeld-fotografie.de) called
"MODULATIONEN Volume_2".
You're invited.
Ciao
--
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__
Hi linux audio community!
I'm going to be releasing my sampler soon, which I've been working on for
several years now. I had this project on hold for manyl months because i'm
too busy with work.. but since it has been near finished, I hope
what is missing I can get it from the linux audio community..
Also, i dont want to announce the release until most bugs are fixed, and
docummentation is written.. since I also dont have time to deal with large
amount of incoming mails i may get about it.. this is why the prerelease
is somewhat "private"
This is by no means a simple app, it's actually quite complex and you will
have some troubles figuring out how it works.. so far then, what I need is:
-TESTERS that are willing to test this and send me as many and detailed bug
reports as possible, so i dont have to waste time finding them
-DOCUMMENTATION WRITERS that are willing to gain understanding on the
working on this app, and what each element of it does so they can write
proper docummentation. on each aspect of it.
So basically.. anyone interested please contact me and you will receive a
tarball with the project sources and some _very_ basic instructions on how it
works.
Thanks!!
Juan Linietsky -
email: coding(a)reduz.com.ar
irc: irc.freenode.net / #lad , username reduz
Folks,
We had a delightful get-together of some Linux Audio Users at the Dog
and Duck last month, where (among other things) we agreed to do it
again in late October. How about this Thursday?
I'm taking the liberty of cross-posting this to the Agnula Users list,
just in case there are other Austin folks in those parts.
Looking forward,
Bill
The Creative SBLive - Emu10K1 mixer
has 3 little boxes under most of the slots. For example,
under IGain are the boxes Lock Mute Rec.
Lock is "checked" for all of the slots on the mixer.
What do these boxes do? I can't find anything about them
on the mixer. Maybe they have something to do with
rec creating empty files? I don't know. I'm just guessing.