soundcard stopping?

[Jan-Espen Pettersen]

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.