sound issues in -CURRENT

[Søren Schmidt]

Eirik Oeverby wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The problem persists, has always persisted, and any message I've posted
> indicating anything else is to be ignored ;)
> 
> Heavy disk I/O seems to be a trigger for the problem. I always hear the
> screwups, but i.e. when building mozilla or openoffice (during the
> extract phase with heavy I/O), sound almost slows down to a complete
> stop, stutters and hicks and cracks all the time - to a point where the
> music is almost impossible to even identify anymore.
> 
> I've tried forcing my soundcard (C-Media and SB Live!) to use a 'free'
> IRQ, i.e. no IRQ sharing - but this doesn't help.
> One good way to reproduce atleast the audible result of the problem is
> to load a kernel module (even something like samba support) while sound
> is playing. Try and thou shall hear.
> 
> Suffice to say, if FreeBSD 5.x goes -STABLE with this issue still
> present it will be a major 'turn off' for many, notwithstanding the
> argument that FreeBSD is not for desktop use anyway :P

I think you are suffering from the high interrupt latency in -current,
this combined with a soundcard with a small buffer would easily lead to 
your problems. A slow disk or PIO mode could also be troublesome in some 
cases. You do have witness etc turned off right ?

-- 
-Søren