Ariff Abdullah wrote:
On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:43:36 -0600
Mark Kane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi everyone. I have been experiencing problems with sound crackling
under certain situations of disk activity for the life of this
machine. It has occurred with 5.4-RELEASE, 6.0-RELEASE, and three
different versions of 6.1-PRERELEASE. It's not a huge problem but I
thought I'd post about this situation in case there is a known fix,
and if not then offer to help try any patches to get it resolved
assuming it's not my hardware being odd.
First off, the relevant hardware is as follows (full dmesg
attached): Athlon64 3000+
GA-K8NS Pro Motherboard (nForce3)
1.5GB RAM
Sound Blaster Augidy 2 Platinum
6 PATA hard drives (varying sizes, see dmesg)
Promise ATA Card (PDC20269)
Originally I thought it was just when extracting archives like tar
or rar which uses disk I/O and CPU power to extract them, but
tonight I was just copying data between drives which I don't do
very much and the problems occurred as well. So then I started
doing some tests of copying an 800MB file back and forth between
hard drives while playing a music file and documenting my results.
My results and the hard drives are at the end of this message. I
didn't test every possible combination because I realized that it
probably has to do with reading from drives in general and not just
extracting archives.
I then did another test with md5 to test my "reading from disk"
theory. When using a utility like `md5`, sound crackling occurred
when using `md5` on files from the same source drives that had
problems copying FROM in the below tests. In other words, copying a
file from ad12 to ad0 produced heavy crackling in the below copy
tests but copying the same file from ad0 to ad12 did not. When
using `md5` on the file located on ad12 it makes the bad crackling
noise, but once again it has no crackling problems when md5ing the
same file located on ad0.
Three of the drives are on the motherboard's on-board controllers.
The mobo has a total of four onboard IDE channels, so each hard
drive is master on it's own dedicated channel and the DVD burner
has it's own channel too. The remaining three hard drives are on a
Promise (PDC20269) PCI ATA card. They all have brand new proper
cables and have no other problems.
The same result happens with different music file types (ogg, wave,
mp3) being played back from various drives. When rebuilding for
6.1-BETA4 I tried the ULE scheduler instead of the 4BSD. ULE seems
to do better for video playback which had some stuttering problems
before, but doesn't change this sound crackling problem when
reading from hard drives. However with ULE I did experience a few
seconds of freezing while trying to get out of my screensaver (just
a black screen) as there was HD activity in the background as well
as an earlier 5-10 second freeze while playing video from one HD at
the same time another HD was decoding some files, but that's
another topic.
I have no special options enabled in my kernel now except for the
emu_10k1 driver and atapicam.
Here is a sample of the crackling when doing some of the below copy
tests. A few seconds of the normal song is first, then I start the
copy when the crackling kicks in...followed by a few seconds of
normal playback again after it's done. It's harder to notice on the
second cut but I tried a couple genres of music. Again, this is not
the worst problem but I'd like to help improve it any way I can
(I'm not a coder, but am very willing to test).
http://www.tntpowerhost.com/mixx941/FreeBSD_sound_crackling.ogg
So in short, when playing audio and reading files from hard drives,
the sound has crackling noises in it. It happens when extracting
archives and copying files from drive to drive with my additional
drives, but reading and extracting from/to ad0 (the FreeBSD install
drive) always seems to work with no crackling. It's just the
additional ones now that seem to have problems when
reading/copying/md5ing from them.
Is this some weird hardware problem on my end? Has anyone else seen
or experienced this? What can I try to help narrow down the problem
if it's not a known one?
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Try to increase pcm buffersize either using kenv(1) or
/boot/device.hints.
# Start from 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536
# kenv hint.pcm.0.buffersize=8192
or to make it permanent, put that into /boot/device.hints
Reload your sound driver.
Hi, thanks for your reply.
My sound is compiled into the kernel so I'm not sure how to reload the
driver without rebooting. I did try the above suggestions though. When
trying 32768 and 65536 the crackling in the audio got worse/louder than
before when copying data.
-Mark
FreeBSD amd64.localhost 6.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #8:
Wed Mar 15 12:04:40 CST 2006
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/AMD643000 amd64
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~]% cat /dev/sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Creative Audigy 2 (EMU10K2)> at io 0x9400 irq 17 (8p/2r/0v
channels duplex default)
================================================
COPY TESTS:
ad0: 194481MB <Maxtor 6B200R0 BAH41BM0> at ata0-master UDMA133
ad8: 76344MB <MAXTOR 6L080J4 A93.0500> at ata4-master UDMA133
ad10: 78166MB <Maxtor 6Y080P0 YAR41BW0> at ata5-master UDMA133
ad11: 156334MB <Maxtor 6Y160P0 YAR41BW0> at ata5-slave UDMA133
ad12: 194481MB <Maxtor 6B200P0 BAH41BM0> at ata6-master UDMA133
ad14: 239372MB <Maxtor 6Y250P0 YAR41BW0> at ata7-master UDMA133
/dev/ad0 (200GB Maxtor on Onboard IDE):
ad0 -> ad10 = Clean
ad0 -> ad12 = Clean
ad0 -> ad14 = Clean
/dev/ad8 (80GB Maxtor on Promise card):
ad8 -> ad10 = Heavy Crackling
ad8 -> ad12 = Slight Crackling
ad8 -> ad14 = Slight Crackling
/dev/ad10 (80GB Maxtor on Promise card):
ad10 -> ad8 = Slight Crackling
ad10 -> ad0 = Slight Crackling
/dev/ad11 (160GB Maxtor on Promise card)):
ad11 -> ad14 = Very Slight Crackling and much faster copy time than
rest
/dev/ad12 (200GB Maxtor on Onboard IDE):
ad12 -> ad0 = Heavy Crackling
ad12 -> ad8 = Heavy Crackling
/dev/ad14 (250GB Maxtor on Onboard IDE):
ad14 -> ad0 = Heavy Crackling
ad14 -> ad8 = Heavy Crackling
ad14 -> ad11 = Heavy Crackling and music stopped playing for a few
seconds (music file being played back is on ad10)
================================================
--
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--
Ariff Abdullah
FreeBSD
--
GnuPG Public Key:
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Internet Radio:
Party107 (Trance/Electronic) - http://www.party107.com
Rock 101.9 The Edge (Rock) - http://www.rock1019.net
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