[Ardour-Users] xruns??? or someting else makes my playhead freeze and Ardour crash

Wendy Van Wynsberghe wendy at constantvzw.com
Fri Sep 7 00:47:15 PDT 2012


Hey

As my previous mail stated - responding to older threads!

So, I was having very very serious Xruns, total Ardour freeze and
aggressive crashes on a very regular interval.

---> System: Ubuntu, Release 12.04 (precise) 32-bit, Kernel Linux
3.2.0-30-generic-pae, Intel® Core™ i3 CPU U 380 @ 1.33GHz × 4

You were right Robin, to state that it was something lowlevel.
Unfortunately I could not make much sense out of hwlatdetect, so
basically I gave up and started using Ardour on other people's
computers, which is very very sad and highly unpractical..

So, last week I focused only on the XRun aspect of my problem (what is
it, possible causes etc). I am not a computer scientist but
linguist/artist/installation bricoleur, so..

These two links helped a lot:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1976254.html
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/20999/solved-looking-for-help-with-xruns/
(this looks very good - but I did not need it:
http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=system_configuration#limits.conf)

So, solution time:
---> I just disabled my wireless & network manager

....

Thanks Ardourians for following up!
And Yeay, Ardour again on my lightweight little Lenovo Thinkpad Edge :-D

(I was beginning to think it was the hardware..)

Greetings from Brussels

Wendy

On 22 May 2012 20:23, Robin Gareus <robin at gareus.org> wrote:
> Hoi Wendy,
>
> On 05/22/2012 03:46 PM, Wendy Van Wynsberghe wrote:
>
>> ---> Try jackd in verbose mode: `jackd -v -d alsa` -  it's really verbose but
>>> some hints may be in there.
>>
>> I have put the output of two different sessions here:
>> http://capacitor.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/37
> [..]
>> ---> I have already tried with other - external - soundcards and I had
>> the same xruns
>
> Ow. So jack is doing fine. It seems to be something more low-level with
> the laptop you're using: System Management Interrupts (SMI) from the
> BIOS, CPU or FSB power-management, freq scaling, or sth that's causing
> it to x-run.
>
> There's "hwlatdetect" - deb/ubuntu package: rt-tests which may help to
> pinpoint the source of the IRQ that causes jack to hang.
>
> ---> I have a lot less xruns by installing a lowlatency kernel
>
> A low-latency kernel helps:
>  - on a busy system: prevent other apps from interfering with sound.
>  - if used with rtirq; if the audio-device shares an IRQ with other
>    devices: sound handling can pull rank over those..
>
> but it won't do any magic to power-management or hardware settings.
>
>> @ Noel Darlow
>> avlinux, that's sounds like a summer plan ;-)
>
> Nah, just burn and boot it. It's a live image and won't touch your HDD
> nor require installation. takes less than 10 mins.
>
> IOW. Exchange the whole OS (incl kernel). If the problem persists: it's
> a hardware issue.
>
> best,
> robin


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