Re: Overruns are killing my recordings.

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On 10/27/05, Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 17:00 -0700, Avuton Olrich wrote:
> > aggh. Sorry for all the noise,
> >
> > I have all my drives on a linear raid and I had hdparm set to put my
> > IDE drives to sleep after a while, I didn't put it together because it
> > was happening in the middle of recording.
>
> Hey, I think it's a testament to the progress that has been made in the
> past year and a half that people now consider audio dropouts in a "known
> good" app like ecasound to be a kernel bug.  For the longest time the
> answer was "linux isn't an RTOS, deal with it".
>
> Lee

Lee, et. all,
   Could this possibly be part of what is causing my xrun problems? I
had a huge rash of xruns yesterday. I seem to run into issues after
longer times of inactivity. I hadn't considered this possibility
before.

   Unfortunately I don't know how to fix this for SATA drives? hdparm
doesn't say much and sdparm gives me info I don't understand:

lightning ~ # hdparm /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 geometry     = 30401/255/63, sectors = 250059350016, start = 0
lightning ~ #

lightning ~ # sdparm /dev/sda
    /dev/sda: ATA       ST3250823AS       3.03
Read write error recovery mode page:
  AWRE        1  [ sav:  1]
  ARRE        1  [ sav:  1]
  PER         0  [ sav:  0]
Caching (SBC) mode page:
  WCE         1  [ sav:  1]
  RCD         0  [ sav:  0]
Control mode page:
  SWP         0  [ sav:  0]
lightning ~ #

Drive performance seems good:

lightning ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   2200 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1100.12 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate
ioctl for device
 Timing buffered disk reads:  198 MB in  3.03 seconds =  65.45 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate
ioctl for device
lightning ~ #

I'm still waiting for someone to address the problem where I cannot
build 2.4.16-rc5-rt7 so this is on -rt3.

Thanks,
Mark