soundcard stopping?

[Nicholas Holley]

Jan-Espen Pettersen wrote:

>On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 07:03, Nicholas Holley wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm running an up to date version of Freebsd 5.1, and I'm having 
>>problems with my soundcard. I have an Asus a7n8x deluxe. The kernel has 
>>pcm support compiled in and the sound card works mostly, but 
>>occasionally the soundcard will not work properly.
>>
>>For example:
>>
>>    - xmms will be playing fine for an hour and then stop with the     
>>            generic error about the soundcard being unavailable
>>    - I'll pause mplayer and unpause it only to have it crash due to the
>>       soundcard being unavailable
>>    - snes9x will stop playing the sound after a short amount of         
>>            playtime
>>
>>Most of the time, I see an error along the lines of an "illegal error". 
>>With mplayer and xmms, usually a couple of tries and the sound will work 
>>again. "fstat | grep dsp" will never output anything when the sound 
>>isn't working so I don't think anything else is blocking the soundcard 
>>plus I have 4 virtual channels set up so that shouldn't be possible anyway.
>>
>>The problem is hard to cause or predict so I can't really provide more 
>>specific situations, but I'm hoping that this has happened to someone 
>>else before.
>>    
>>
>
>I think this has something to do with malloc(9) returning NULL. (with
>M_NOWAIT flag) Therefore dsp operations which requires memory allocation
>or realloc will fail if there is not enough memory free to immediately
>fullfill the alloc requests. The driver will then return ENOMEM.
>
>I've seen debug messages here indicating a return value of 12 (ENOMEM)
>from, I think it was some feeder init functions, but can't recall and
>couldn't find it in the logs anymore, sorry.
>  
>
Is there a diagnostic path I can take to try to find out more or should 
I just plug in my SoundBlaster? Also is this I should approach the 
driver developer about?

Thanks,

Nick