Re: pulseaudio / alc1220 sound clicks interruptions etc

Hi,

> > If this is a scheduling/video driver issue, I would say, definitely
> > upgrade and test whether the problem is still present.
> 
> I'll update later today but this issue has been present for 3 years now.

If you're upgrading from 14.1, nothing special has changed in the scheduler.

Previously, there were scheduler bugs causing annoying pops from time to time, but these were fixed around July/August 2022, and the fix was in 13.2 and onwards (if the problem occured with 13.0 or 13.1, you should normally have seen an improvement with later versions, not a degradation).

I'm not aware of any scheduler bugs causing this kind of behavior, and would say they are currently unlikely.

Testing an upgrade in case of such a problem is always a good idea in absence of a clear culprit.

The common denominator of all your reports seems to be Intel Hybrid Architecture (Alder Lake and onwards), which the scheduler does not especially support now.  I'm currently working on this support (this is not going to be ready soon).

Could you please try the following (preferably 1):
1. Disable E (Efficiency) cores from your BIOS if possible, reboot, test again and report.
2. Pin the application reading audio to a P (Performance) core with cpuset, test again and report.  To know which cores are performance ones, run 'cpucontrol -i 0x1a /dev/cpuctlXXX' on your cores and check that the first hexadecimal value starts with 4 (a 2 indicates an efficiency core).

If that doesn't show any difference, something else is at play and we'll then advise.

Thanks and regards.

-- 
Olivier Certner