[linux-audio-user] Kernels, and disk I/O

Hi While all the excited chat is about the shiny new kernel 2.6.0, I have a 2.4.x question: I used 2.4.18 until recently, when I found that a disk I/O scheduling problem (lack of responsiveness while writing backups to an optical disk) was solved by upgrading to 2.4.20. Now I find that recording audio on 2.4.20 is useless, with long droputs in the recorded sound. I'm sure this is related to the way the system periodically dozes off for a few seconds (not echoing console input) while it does some disk intensive work. Rebooting 2.4.18 restored audio sanity, fortunately. The kernel has no low-latency patches applied. The sound system is M-Audio DIO2448 + OSS drivers Hard disk is standard IDE, tuned with hdparm Distro is Debian 3.0 with quite a lot of "testing" packages installed. Base H/W 800MHz Duron + 256M RAM. This does seem to be related to the disk I/O scheduling change, or possibly virtual memory Is there a kernel guru who can advise? Possible options seem to be: 1. Apply low latency patches 2. Upgrade to 2.4.22 3. Upgrade to 2.6.0 4. something else? -- Anahata anahata(a)treewind.co.uk Tel: 01638 720444 http://www.treewind.co.uk Mob: 07976 263827