From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jan 17 01:06:25 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D84E106568D for ; Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:06:25 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from pieter@degoeje.nl) Received: from mx.utwente.nl (mx2.utsp.utwente.nl [130.89.2.13]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B5B88FC1B for ; Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:06:24 +0000 (UTC) Received: from nox.student.utwente.nl (nox.student.utwente.nl [130.89.165.91]) by mx.utwente.nl (8.12.10/SuSE Linux 0.7) with ESMTP id o0H132F4005678; Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:03:02 +0100 From: Pieter de Goeje To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:03:01 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.10 References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <201001170203.02499.pieter@degoeje.nl> X-UTwente-MailScanner-Information: Scanned by MailScanner. Contact icts.servicedesk@utwente.nl for more information. X-UTwente-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-UTwente-MailScanner-From: pieter@degoeje.nl X-Spam-Status: No Cc: Thomas Hummel Subject: Re: Sound (micro-)interrupts with 8.0 stable/snd_hda/mplayer/vlc X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:06:25 -0000 On Saturday 16 January 2010 19:17:18 Thomas Hummel wrote: > Hello, > > I'm not really sure what the right list is since I cannot isolate the part > of > the system which cause the problem : > > I could use a little help on a weird sound issue I'm struggling with : > > 1. Description : > ------------------------ > > When playing audio files, the sound has from few to many > "micro-interrupts" > (less than 1/4 of a second), randomly but frequently (so this is not hard > to > reproduce). This seem to occur : > > . with any file (I can pick a random audio file to experience it) > . with either mp3 or flaac encoded files > . with mplayer (from the ports collection or hand compiled from svn), > either with oss or sdl audio output (although sdl seems to have less > "interrupts") > . with vlc > > but > > . not with ffplay > . apparently not with xine > . apparently not with amarok Amarok uses xine. All of the above ultimately use OSS to output the sound. > > -> so I doubt this may be a harware or a driver issue. > > and on a almost idle 4GB RAM machine running only KDE-4 and firefox-3 > > no hints shows in /var/log/messages > > 2. Config : > ------------ > > I'm running : > > . 8.0-STABLE FreeBSD amd64 > > . full zfs (no ufs) (files are on a "slow" disk pool (5400 rpm) but > moving them to the "fast" system disk (7200 rpm) doesn't change anything > > . on a (bios up to date) P5Q3 ASUS motherboard > > . with snd_hda sound driver [snip] Try increasing the hw.snd.latency sysctl: hw.snd.latency Configure the buffering latency. Only affects applications that do not explicitly request blocksize / fragments. This tunable provides finer granularity than the hw.snd.latency_profile tun- able. Possible values range between 0 (lowest latency) and 10 (highest latency). Just thinking out loud here, but maybe you have some non-standard HZ configured or powerd configured to clock the CPU back by an extreme amount, both could theoretically cause buffer underruns. - Pieter