Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 08:25:04 +0100 (MET) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: adhir@worldbank.org (Alok K. Dhir) Cc: smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sound trouble Message-ID: <199802120725.IAA18869@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96.980211112505.13156A-100000@shadow.worldbank.org> from "Alok K. Dhir" at Feb 11, 98 11:37:33 am
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[cc list trimmed to smp, since people on multimedia and -current might already know this] > The Workstation 400 has a Crystal CSS4236B sound chip on the motherboard. > The only driver I've been able to get sound working with on this > machine/kernel is "Luigi's" plug and play pcm driver. I couldn't get > the "standard" Voxware drivers to work at all, and the OSS drivers (which > I bought) don't work with SMP kernels (annoyingly enough). you should have tried the OSS demo first :) > Luigi's sound driver works OK, but I'd like to see a more robust, complete > sound solution for this machine. When I try to run "timidity" (the just to be sure, did you recompile timidity with my audio module (which you can get from the sound distribution in my FreeBSD web page http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD.html) ? > software wavetable midi player which used the GUS patch set), it starts > out sounding nice for about half a second. Then it starts mixing in an > incredible amount of noise until its completely unbearable to listen to. > Similarly, some games (like xgal) make horrible noises... > > I wonder if this could have something to do with SMP? Other things, such > as xanim, mpg123, and a few others render sound without any trouble. Ok, I know the problem: many apps ported to voxware use the device in non blocking mode, and rely on the ability to set the buffer size in the device driver. Then in many case they fail to check for short writes. This is a bug which might go unnoticed on slow systems if data is produced more slowly than the card can consume them. But you evidently have a top-speed system... Of course properly written software (e.g. xanim, mpg123, amp...) does not have the problem. Software which is poorly written (at least in the audio module -- and that's quite frequent) shows the problem. In some cases I have fixed audio modules, but not for most games since I don't run them :) cheers luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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