Greetings and salutations Pulseaudio's behavior on my Neo has annoyed me for a while, and now I got around to poking it a bit, with not much results but some. The visible issue is that eg. when playing music with openmoko-mediaplayer, the pulseaudio server hogs up 25-30% of the CPU, which is enough to cause serious skipping of the audio (at least my sample ogg tracks from Harvey Danger, googlable for free download). This with no other clients playing anything, of course, so no mixing required, just pushing bits from buffer to sound driver.
ogg123, not going through pulseaudio, plays the same tracks quite well at around 80% CPU. Pulseaudio behavior is the same whether I use native ALSA or OSS sinks. I straced pulseaudio a bit while playing music. Obviously, the strace emphasized the skipping severely and quite possibly isn't useful for diagnosis due to altering a lot of the timing, but some stuff was still going through. Anyway, the thing that caught my eye was that between each write to the audio device there were 16 pairs of alternating calls: rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, ~[RTMIN RT_1], [], 8) = 0 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0 I presumed this to be threading-related, but apparently pulseaudio doesn't do threads after all. Then I presumed it to be rabid syncing with the shared memory area the client uses to communicate with it, but it seems to persist with --disable-shm (as does the CPU hogging, whether it's related or not). Now I just presume pulseaudio is on crack. Soo yeah. At this point I'd like to ask if anyone has any clue on... 1) what kind of crack it is? 2) where can we find and steal its crack? One should hopefully be able to have a decent mediaplayer experience without waiting for GTA-02 in order to have more CPU to feed to the relentless pulseaudio. (Despite pulseaudio offering some services besides mere software mixing, one could also wonder if it's more trouble than worth instead of just using alsa, dmix and, for the higher level stuff, gstreamer, but I digress somewhat. Hopefully it's easily fixable to consume sane amounts of CPU regardless.) -- Mikko Rauhala - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/> Transhumanist - WTA member - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/> Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>
