On Friday 24 November 2000 11:06, Nick Bailey wrote: > A student of mine came up with this one. Can anybody see what's wrong > with it (I can't!) > > When playing a sinewave through esd on a PowerPC Debian System (A Mac > G4), the output is interrupted at random intervals. If esd is run "nice > --5 esd" as root, the system will just about play uninterrupted. > > I am a bit suprised at this because the very old P200 in my office has > only slight problems with exactly the same code. Is there some > fundamental problem with the scheduler here? I'd've really expected a > machine with a processor like the G4 to keep up with 44k1 16-bit mono. > Does anyone have any comments here (sorry if it's bad form sending > source to the list: it's only short!)
afaik, esound has some fundamental problems on PowerPC that essentially render it unusable (due to the problems you've just noted). it skips so badly and so often for me with xmms that sounds are unrecognizable. Other apps don't seem to have such trouble, so I suspect it's some problem betwixt esd and dmasound; probably an issue with the size of the output buffers? However, I've switched to 2.4 now and it works perfectly (so I'm afraid I've lost all incentive to work out why it's such a basketcase on 2.2 - probably something improved in dmasound? you could try one of the kernels that has the 2.4 dmasound backported into it - I know they exist... might help. Sorry I don't know anymore.
