Ess Solo-1 interrupt behaviour (fwd)

Ess Solo-1 interrupt behaviour (fwd)

[Samium Gromoff]

Forwarded message:
> From root Tue Feb 19 15:52:24 2002
> Subject: Ess Solo-1 interrupt behaviour
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:52:24 +0300 (MSK)
> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL6]
> Content-Length: 1318      
> 
>         I`ve recently spotted that a solo1 pci soundcard generates
> 16000+ interrupts/second with esd started idling.
> 
> 	What strikes me as odd is that my old good isa sb16 vibra
> does only 600+ interrupts.
> 
> 	Also i`ve had some strange experience of this interrupt load
> affecting the disk io.
> 	The situation was the next: i`ve had a large transfer to a samba
> boxen with this poor solo1 soundcard. I would like to emphasize that i
> turn off the drive write-caching ability in order to gain reliability,
> and that with write cacheing the following issues are hardly noticeable.
> 	So yes, i was copying large amount of data thru the 10mbit rtl8029s
> to the samba box. What i`ve tested are two situations: with esd on ==
> effective 16,5k interrupts/second, and with esd off, and thus no interrupts
> generated by the solo1 card.
> 	What i`ve noticed quite disappointed me: with esd turned on, the disk
> writeout activity (well, the seek activity) was _much_ higher.
> 	Ie i`ve stopped esd, the seekage dropped down, i`ve started esd - 
> seekage goes back.
> 
> 	So we basically have here two strange issues:
> 		1. Ess Solo-1 driver generates awful lots of interrupts (16k/s)
> 		2. Heavy interrupt load forces the elevator to make bad
> 	decisions
> 
> 	Info: linux-2.4.17-rmap12e, p2-300 128M RAM, rtl8029 NIC, Ess Solo-1 SB
> 
> regards, Samium Gromoff
> 
> 
resending, Samium Gromoff