Sound Crackling When Reading From Hard Drives

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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20060316/f9a541ca/attachment.pgp