Re: Strange load issues with 2.5.69/70 in both -mm and -bk trees.

[Tom Sightler]

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 11:12, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> a question - which process in your system is responsible for the sound
> output?

In this simple test scenario it is wine itself (the actual process which
I am renicing).  I verified this with a 'lsof' while sound was playing.

This is why I keep saying that it almost seems as if it is the kernel
itself that is being starved (perhaps starved is the wrong word here).

If the environment is a simple as:

pluginserver-->/dev/dsp-->hardware

and renicing the pluginserver process to a lower priority is what makes
the sound stop skipping, then what else can it be?

I am using ALSA with OSS emulation, but I did try the OSS driver as
well.  My primary testing machine is a laptop with a Maestro3 sound card
which is known to be buggy sometimes (although I've actually had very
good success with it, especially with ALSA), but I have reproduced this
issue with my desktop at home which is an Athlon 950Mhz with a
Soundblaster live, although it is less noticable.

It's been suggested I may be tripping some type of hardware quirk here,
perhaps a shared interrupt issue, or simple PCI bandwidth or latency.  I
suppose this is possible and I'm looking at these kinds of tweaks, but I
think they are unlikely as why would renicing a userspace process make
this type of problem go away?

Later,
Tom