Sound Crackling When Reading From Hard Drives
Ariff Abdullah
ariff at FreeBSD.org
Thu Mar 16 09:19:17 UTC 2006
On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:43:36 -0600
Mark Kane <mark at mkproductions.org> 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.
>
> -Mark
>
> FreeBSD amd64.localhost 6.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #8:
> Wed Mar 15 12:04:40 CST 2006
> mixx941 at amd64.localhost:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/AMD643000 amd64
>
> [mixx941 at amd64:~]% 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)
> ================================================
>
> --
> GnuPG Public Key:
> http://www.mkproductions.org/mk_pubkey.asc
>
> Internet Radio:
> Party107 (Trance/Electronic) - http://www.party107.com
> Rock 101.9 The Edge (Rock) - http://www.rock1019.net
>
> IRC:
> MIXXnet IRC Network - irc.mixxnet.net (Nick: MIXX941)
>
--
Ariff Abdullah
FreeBSD
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