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Rygel

Started: Monday, November 24, 2003 21:49

Finished: Monday, November 24, 2003 22:03

At this point, the system I have dubbed "Rygel" is more or less up and working.

With the exception of the hard drive and sound card, it's actually a completely separate set of hardware from Argo. (Actually, even the hard drive wasn't Argo's until a couple months ago either. It's Dagobah's former drive.)

Rygel, being a Celeron instead of an Athlon, isn't quite as snappy as Argo, but functional enough. Kohan, probably the most cpu intensive thing I do on a regular basis, is playable, although it's a bit rough when scrolling. Annoyingly, anything doing audio output has tiny little pops and distortions in the stream every few seconds, regardless of whether I buffer it or not. Wierd, since I'm even using the same sound card and sound drivers as Argo had. Oh well. This will definitely tide me over for a while though. Thanks to my dad for having extra hardware lying around.

I haven't yet attempted to transplant my dvd drive or memory, but I may do so in the near future.

The other thing I need to do is get my database running locally again, then downsync the last few ramblings I've done on hydrogen. Should be a fairly straightforward process.

Then there's the issue of all the case covers haphazardly scattered around my chair. Minor stuff.

But right now, I think I'll go to bed. Sleep is required.

Latency
by Jäger (2003-11-24 23:16)

This may or may not have anything at all to do with your audio problems, but it might be worthwhile to check to see what irq your sound card is grabbing, whether it's sharing with any of its pci sibblings, and what priority the irq is. The irq-tweaking section of the low latency mini-howto might be of interest.

(Incidently, are you running 2.4 or 2.6?)

Interesting
by Bitscape (2003-11-25 12:36)

I checked that out, and my sound card is on IRQ 9, with nothing else sharing it. So on that front, it looks good.

I'm running old reliable 2.4.21. Maybe I should try 2.6 again.

Further analyses
by Bitscape (2003-11-25 20:15)

After observing it for a while, I have concluded that the problem is related to disc access. Whenever any of the IDE devices are accessed, even if only for a few microseconds, that's when the sound gets all fudged up. I'm thinking I might try tweaking the kernel options for the motherboard's chipset, which hopefully might help things.

DMA?
by Jäger (2003-11-26 18:55)

Don't forget to compile in support for your specific IDE chipset and make sure DMA is enabled. (I think it should be by default for known chipsets in recent kernels, but double-check what hdparm reveals.)

Of course, it's always possible you've uncovered a strange and mysterious bug somewhere deep within the kernel, something only the specific interactions of your handware can unveil. Isn't that a plesant thought? :)

Radio Interference
by bouncing (2003-11-26 21:58)

I've had that exact problem myself. Move your sound card to another PCI slot. It's probably radio interference.

-k