Re: 2.6.24-rt1: timing problems (was [git pull] x86/hrtimer/acpi fixes)

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano <nando@ccrma.Stanford.EDU>]

On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 05:46 +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-01-26 at 17:59 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> 
> > Hi Ingo... back to testing. 
> > History:
> > 
> > 2.6.23.x + rt has not been very usable for audio applications. 
> > 2.6.24-rt1: same so far. 
> > 
> > Why: Jack keeps printing "delayed..." messages and has xruns which means
> > that somehow the timing is delayed more than what jack would think
> > reasonable. As in the case with an old timing bug, the problem
> > dissapears when booting the kernel with idle=poll. Other users of Planet
> > CCRMA are able to replicate the behavior, which goes away with idle=poll
> > or booting the machine with only one core. As a workaround I have been
> > packaging 2.6.22.x but now I'm not able to use that as the old rt14
> > patch, suitably tweaked results in a non working kernel. 
> > 
> > So it looks like, again, timing is getting skewed when the jack process
> > jumps between cpus and thus jack sees timing jumps that are just not
> > happenning. 
> > 
> > This is with a build based on 2.6.24 using as a base the latest Fedora
> > rawhide source package plus 2.6.24-rt1. 
> 
> Do you have a simple testcase?  (one which doesn't entail installing
> ccrma and becoming an audiophile)

No, I don't at this point. 
I'll see if I can cook something simple today... (naively thinking that
some short C code could test for the clock being actually monotonic
across cpus). 

-- Fernando