Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 20:16:29 -0500 From: Sean Welch <Sean_Welch@alum.wofford.org> To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: More on sound issues with 5.2.1-RELEASE on Dell I8000 Message-ID: <20040427011629.GA2789@NitroPhys.welchsmnet.net>
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I apologize in advance for cross-posting; the nature of this issue appears to be relevant to both lists. I had posted earlier to the multimedia list about this problem. In short, I have discovered that with my batteries installed playing any sounds through pcm (with the exception of audio cds) is plagued by blurs or blips lasting fractions of a second. Without batteries installed this does not occur, and the symptoms are unrelated to AC line status. The problem isn't there under either 5.2-RELEASE or 4.9-RELEASE. I've been playing around a bit with FreeSBIE (nice!) and a lark popped it into my Dell only to find that the sound issue wasn't there! Earlier I had already tried all sorts of mods to the sound code and also reverted to a GENERIC kernel but was unable to make the problem go away. This time I left everthing as I already had it (stock sound code and custom kernel) and tried to play my test mp3 from the command line using amp outside of X (gdm running, but logged in under a vt) and there were no problems. Then I started X on :1 (gdm had :0) running just twm and neither amp nor xmms had a problem. I added gkrellm and still no problem. I started up esd and still had no issues. At this point, convinced it was something running under my gnome session, I logged from gdm and immediately saw the sound problem again. Taking a stab in the dark I shut down the battery status applet and the problem disappeared! Curious, I tried switching to the apm component in gkrellm for battery status and the problem returned. I found the same issue with xbattbar as well. Evidently the issue is with the apm emulation used to give battery status when using acpi; it looks as though any program that polls this code causes the sound blurs/blips. A couple of wrinkles -- the blurs/blips return when the batteries are all topped up and the AC line is connected. I can trigger a blur/blip by running the apm command, though it doesn't happen absolutely every time I run it. Specifically, it doesn't happen every time when I run apm with short intervals between iterations. Is there some sort of cache involved with this? So what's the next step? Seanhome | help
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