26 Apr
2003
26 Apr
'03
7:24 a.m.
Hi Mark
this is sounding expensive...
surely others in the LL audio world are using the "IDE interface: VIA
Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)" - has
anyone anything good/bad to say about this (BTW: i did enable all the 'fix
borken VIA' stuff in the kernel options).
Normally there isn't much you can do about this,
other than put in some
other ATA disk controller or go SCSI, which I wouldn't recommend just
yet. Fortunately I don't think any of that is really necessary just yet.
These are good experiments though. On the NIC side, just unpluging the
cable would normally be enough to test.
well - i didn't unplug the cable, but i did an ifconfig eth0 down, which AFAIK
closes the interface entirely. i'm behind a firewall too, so i shouldn't be
exposed to the usual babble of ill-config'd M$ machines.
i'm willing to be disabused by someone knowledgeable here.
This is where I think we really start getting into PC
chipset design.
(something I used to do for AMD.) Without belaboring the details, a good
card is capable of getting data to and from memory without much
processor interaction and very efficiently on the PCI bus. If it does
that, then what's left is basically how it tells the processor what's
going on, which is the interrupt service routine's job. However, even a
great sound card can be hindered by other parts of the PC (like other
PCI cards) usign the bus badly.
You don't happen to be using a PCI VGA adapter, do you? I Cannot
remember at this point.
i wish it were so easy - i have AGP.
> the most
success so far with the testing seems to be at 1024 - though
> large file copies causes massive xruns at any rate (BTW: how large
> would a 'large' file be?).
This sounds like an interrupt problem, or else a bad set of hard disk
device drivers. If you sound card want to interrupt, it should get
serviced even if the hard disk was on the bus. Possibly the DMA
controller in this ATA chipset isn't very efficient.... I think I'd maybe try running Benno's disk
latency test first. IF it
says you have long latency issues in your disk subsystem, then a newer
sound card isn't going to do you much good.
it segfaults for me. it inspired me to try to use the jackd output as a guide
for tuning the machine since i realised i wouldn't get far without some sort
of measurement/instrumentation.
so my current alternatives are;
1. post my results
2. learn gdb and try to get latency test to work
3. buy a new snd card. pray.
4. buy a PCI IDE card. waste a lot of time. pray.
5. buy a new mobo whose chipset is recommended.
i'll post again when i've organised my test results. hopefully someone smarter
than i can make some sense of it all (well audio-wise anyhow) and point me in
the right direction.....
thanks all for your assistance thus far
R