[linux-audio-user] xruns in jackd & not all devices in /dev/snd

Hello everyone I recently decided to try to do some audiowork on GNU/Linux, because I'm very interestend in music and I saw that there seem to be a few nice applications for my OS of choice :-) So, I'm quite new to this stuff... Now I've got a few problems running jack. The first (minor) problem is, that at the time the rc-script for jack runs, there are no pcmC0D(0|1)(c|p) devices in /dev/snd, so jack doesn't start automatically, because it can't find them. The funny thing is, the jackd is the last daemon started. Right after the rc-script runs, the login prompt appears and after I log in, the devices exist and I can start the daemon. Does anyone have an idea about what may be the cause of this "delay" in the creation of these devices? May it have to do with me using Udev instead of DevFS? The major problem I have is, that when I start jack, I get xruns, even without any other application running... (except system processes such as crond...) They're starting to appear about 5 seconds after jack started and I'm getting one about every second. The command I use for running jackd is: jackd -d alsa -d hw:0 -n 8 (If I don't specify -n 8, jack wouldn't even start) I'm using ArchLinux, running a 'selfmade' kernel 2.6.8.1 with the voluntary preempt patch applied. Actually I wanted to keep a 2.4-kernel, but the distribution recently updatet to gcc-3.4, so I needed to patch the kernel, because without this gcc-3.4-fix it wouldn't compile anymore. Unfortunately this fix seemded to interfere with the other patches I wanted to apply for low-latency. And finally the hardware I use: - soundcard: RME DIGI 96/8 PST - CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1800 - Mainboard: some Epox E8K9A7I with VIA KT400A chipset. Does anybody have an idea on how to solve this xrun-issue? Or do you think it's impossible to do this with my hardware and linux-2.6*? Thank you in advance -Michael Wagner