Horrific jackd xrun behaviour after upgrade from US 10.04 to 12.04 (Re: R: Audio issues in 10.04)

Thomas Orgis thomas-forum at orgis.org
Tue Sep 18 09:39:08 UTC 2012


Am Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:30:49 +0200
schrieb Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum at orgis.org>: 

> > Please post the output of
> > $ /etc/init.d/rtirq status
> 
> Will try to get to that tonight.

Well ... this is interesting. I tried AVLinux and this also showed
massive xruns, with the added twist of ffado giving up on the device
after some time. I then thought that maybe swapping the firewire card
to another slot might help. It shared IRQ with some USB ports. I shoved
it into the x16 slot (using onboard graphics).

Now, would I have been properly awake at that time, I'd have thought
that the generally abysmal performance cannot have something to do with
the firewire card, as it also shows for internal audio and a USB card.
But, perhaps it was a step towards the final goal.

Thing is, the machine did not want to start after swapping the firewire
card. Pulling the card out, waiting, connecting/disconnecting power ...
and the machine boots again. To shorten it a bit: I must have had
something funky with the power connection to the card. On the same wire
branch s a SATA power adapter for the 3rd hard disk and I suspect it
having had some bad insulation, causing flaky current / shorting out.
That would explain the box dying on moving said branch about a bit, and
some protection circuit preventing powering on again (for some time).

I managed to get the thing running again after adding insulation to the
supposedly faulty adapter, and what might play a part: The BIOS got
reset. I'm with defaults there now. I'm leaving the box running for the
day with JACK on firewire under UbuntuStudio (my partial KXStudio).
During the first minutes I did not see one underrun and could record a
bit with Ardour. II faintly remember that I checked internal audio,
too, and it seemed to be fine.

So it could be down to flaky power to the firewire card / the system at
all (but how could that subtly influence the machine without killing it
outright?) or, what I think is more probable, some BIOS setting. I'll
check that later, if the test is successful. Anoter remote possibility
would be that the machine freaks out generally when the first PCIe slot
is occupied --- I'll move the firewire card back to see if that makes a
change.

Anyhow, here's the current interrupts (see how the one for firewire is
the most populated?):

           CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       
  0:        124          0          1   IO-APIC-edge      timer
  1:        465          0         25   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
  7:          1          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      parport0
  8:          0          0          1   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
  9:          0          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
 12:      12464         19       1858   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
 14:          0          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      pata_atiixp
 15:          0          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      pata_atiixp
 16:          0          2        838   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ohci_hcd:usb3, ohci_hcd:usb4, snd_hda_intel
 17:          1       1682       2187   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1
 18:      50797          4        975   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ohci_hcd:usb5, ohci_hcd:usb6, ohci_hcd:usb7, radeon, firewire_ohci
 19:          0          5       1747   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb2
 22:       1442         60      15896   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ahci
 42:          0          0          0   PCI-MSI-edge      eth3
NMI:          0          0          0   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:     215017     224583     218795   Local timer interrupts
SPU:          0          0          0   Spurious interrupts
PMI:          0          0          0   Performance monitoring interrupts
IWI:          0          0          0   IRQ work interrupts
RES:      38575      50657      61704   Rescheduling interrupts
CAL:        498        451        613   Function call interrupts
TLB:        759        889        843   TLB shootdowns
TRM:          0          0          0   Thermal event interrupts
THR:          0          0          0   Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE:          0          0          0   Machine check exceptions
MCP:          1          1          1   Machine check polls
ERR:          1
MIS:          0

rtirq:

  PID CLS RTPRIO  NI PRI %CPU STAT COMMAND	
  302 FF      90   - 130  0.6 S    irq/18-firewire	
  994 FF      83   - 123  0.0 S    irq/16-snd_hda_	
   84 FF      80   - 120  0.0 S    irq/17-ehci_hcd	
   88 FF      80   - 120  0.0 S    irq/16-ohci_hcd	
   86 FF      79   - 119  0.0 S    irq/19-ehci_hcd	
   90 FF      79   - 119  0.0 S    irq/16-ohci_hcd	
   99 FF      75   - 115  0.0 S    irq/1-i8042	
   98 FF      74   - 114  0.1 S    irq/12-i8042	
   23 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/9-acpi	
   73 FF      50   -  90  0.4 S    irq/22-ahci	
   92 FF      50   -  90  0.1 S    irq/18-ohci_hcd	
   94 FF      50   -  90  0.1 S    irq/18-ohci_hcd	
   96 FF      50   -  90  0.1 S    irq/18-ohci_hcd	
  100 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/8-rtc0	
  287 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/14-pata_ati	
  288 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/15-pata_ati	
  295 FF      50   -  90  0.1 S    irq/18-radeon	
  965 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/7-parport0	
 1212 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/42-eth3	
    3 TS       -   0  19  1.0 R    ksoftirqd/0	
    9 TS       -   0  19  1.0 S    ksoftirqd/1	
   13 TS       -   0  19  1.0 S    ksoftirqd/2	

One relevant BIOS setting could concern the SATA ports ... presence of 
pata_ati means that they're running in ATA mode, not AHCI, right? I
remember switching them to AHCI before because, well, I want proper
SATA operation. Could that bork up interrupt behaviour? If that's it,
fine, whatever makes the system stable ... but it would still feel
wrong to not run SATA disks in AHCI mode in 2012.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

PS: Oh, in case you wonder, my recording device is a FA-101 ... though
I do test internal audio and a simple USB sound card, too. And the
firewire card is actually a TI one, not VIA (I confused it with a PCI
VIA card I also have ... and which I could test in this box if need
arises).
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