pcm problem (static, noise) (re: pr kern/14990, kern/44512)

[Fred Clift]

Hi.  I've been meaning to either track down the problem myself, or ask
someone about this for a while.

About 1 out of 20 times, when applications try to play audio to my sound
card, I get static, that lasts as long as the device is held open.

I've noticed this under mpg123, mplayer, xmms and some others.  A typical
scenario is this:  I'm listenting to music with xmms and I get a phone
call - I pause xmms, talk on the phone and then unpause xmms.  every once
in a while I get white noise or static, out of both speakers, instead of
the music I expect.  Simply pausing my player, and unpausing again will
almost always make the problem go away though every now and then it takes
a couple of tries....

I note that there are two pr's I've seen that seem to show similar
symptoms; kern/14990 and kern/44512.  The first is quite old and applies
to 4.0-release, and is closed, though after a superficial look at the
source it doesn't look like the supplied patch was incorperated into
FreeBSD.  The second offers no suggestions.

In short, my question is, "has kern/14990 been incorperated into the pcm
driver?  if not, why not?  why was this pr closed with no update about
eventual resolution or lack thereof?"  I'd like to know before I go about
merging in those suggested changes to 4.8 or -current.

Otherwise, does anyone have any ideas what might be up?  I've lived with
this for literally, years.  I'm getting close to annoyed enough to
actually work on it now.

A few snippets of useful information....  The sound card is an integraded
CS chip on a Dell Optiplex GX1 motherboard, partial dmesg and uname -a
below.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
FreeBSD vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net 4.8-STABLE FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE #7: Sat Aug
9 08:02:33 MDT 2003
root at vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/VESPA  i386


pcm0: <CS423x> at port 0x534-0x537,0x388-0x38b,0x220-0x22f irq 5 drq 1,0
on isa0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Fred

--
Fred Clift - fclift at verio.net -- Remember: If brute
force doesn't work, you're just not using enough.