Re: [LAU] IRQ tuning

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 12:00:30PM +0200, Roman Mu??oz wrote: I went through this wringer, it took 6 months, and I've posted here and on the jack-dev and freebob lists, about it, and blogged about it extensively too. Hopefully my experience will save you time, money, and headaches. The conclusions I came to are: 1) If you are on a machine with PCI slots, you can change your IRQ mappings by physically moving your cards into different slots. Trial and error is the only thing that works here. 2) If you have a laptop, or otherwise have to use the built-in chips on the motherboard, you are stuck with whatever IRQ mapping you've got, unless your BIOS offers you the option to change them. The only BIOS I have heard of which allows this, is IBM/Lenovo's on their ThinkPad's. 3) The hda-intel chip is complete and utter crap, and is unsuited for any serious RT audio use. Get a USB or firewire interface. Then again, if all you're doing is playing music from softsynths (not recording live audio), in stereo and not 5-channel surround, and it works for you, then you can probably continue using the hda-intel without worrying about it. 4) If you decide to go with firewire, make sure you don't have a Ricoh chip (lspci will tell you). They have a bug in their streaming implementation and simply do not work for audio. The TI chips work well, and are specifically recommended by some firewire audio manufacturers (i.e. Edirol). 5) Use Debian Sid (not Etch), or Sidux, or even easier, a music distro like UbuntuStudio, 64Studio, Musix, etc, which are Debian-based anyway. 6) If you're using softsynths, or LADSPA plugins and other DSP stuff, get the absolutely fastest CPU(s) that you can (or can't) afford. Anyway, YMMV, etc, but the above worked for me and I'm happy with the results. - -ken