> The kernel has no low-latency patches applied. That will make a difference. > The sound system is M-Audio DIO2448 + OSS drivers > Hard disk is standard IDE, tuned with hdparm > Distro is Debian 3.0 with quite a lot of "testing" packages installed. > Base H/W 800MHz Duron + 256M RAM. > > This does seem to be related to the disk I/O scheduling change, or > possibly virtual memory > > Possible options seem to be: > 1. Apply low latency patches Yes (low-latency and preemptible) > 2. Upgrade to 2.4.22 Well, why not? I do recall I had some problems with lowlatency somewhere between between 2.4.14 en 2.4.22, related with a specific DMA controller.. You might want to go for 2.4.23 though! > 3. Upgrade to 2.6.0 That's a though question.. I think it is good of more linux-audio-users move to 2.6, so we can get a clear idea of how linux-audio (and specifically low latency) is going along with 2.6, and where the problems are. On the other hand, it might be better to wait a while. As discussed in the thread about 2.6, latency is still beter with a patched 2.4, and there is a lot of stuff from Andrew Morton waiting to go into 2.6. > 4. something else? Well, just that, since you are using Debian, you might want to build a debian kernel package. It's a bit tricky if it's the first time you do it, but applying patches is done nicely for you. If you want to walk this road, let me know, and I can tell you how to do it. On the other hand, if it's only one machine... Using the vanilla kernel and patching it is probably easier. Maarten
