> Welcome! I'm a Pro Tools user under Windows. On the Windows side we have > not had these warnings about reducing disk cache, as far as I can > remember... I'm glad to meet you. I've been playing with Pro Tools since 4.3.1, and my studio is running currently running MIX plus on an old beige G3/300 running MacOS 9. I've often wanted to migrate over to Windows, but we'd lose all of our plug-ins. Pro Tools is actually one of my biggest motives for moving to Linux - one gets tired of jumping through flaming hoops every time DigiDesign or Apple release new hardware or software. > Forgiven. No problem. However, this means you are doing latency testing > to your system drive. Is this correct? You do not have a second, > separate audio drive at this point? I ask as I notice you have the > Promise ATA controller on IRQ11. Well...I *do* have a third drive hooked up to the Promise controller, but upon installing it, I discovered that my power supply doesn't want to supply power to another drive - even though I have enough power hookups. I can only use the drive if I disconnect power from my LS120, CD-ROM or Windows hard drive. Time to buy a new power supply.... > Also, maybe I forgot, but what windowing environment are you running? > KDE? Gnome? I run fluxbox and think it's quite nice for audio, if you > like minimalistic environments. I raise this question as I had a lot fo > similar problems with KDE, and never tried Gnome after I got fluxbox > working well. (And it's very easy to try out without effecting what ever > your other environment is.) I'm running Blackbox - we seem to be cousins. For what it's worth, I've also posted my XF86Config: http://www.comevisit.com/NorthernSunrise/latency/XF86Config It has a few things I need to fix, but nothing that I think would affect audio performance. > OK, one potential problem I spot is the IRQ for your audio controller is > about the worst it could have at IRQ5. As a Mac guy you are forgiven if > you don't realize how screwed up Intel architecture interrupts are. The My machine is absolutely adamant that the sound card *has* to go there :( I spent many frustrating and fruitless hours trying to address this issue. I sifted through every single BIOS setting, juggled the cards all over the place, but the only way I could get the card off IRQ 5 was by disabling that IRQ. When I did this, it moved the card up to IRQ 4, and so on. In short, my machine *always* gives the sound card the lowest-priority IRQ, and provides no way (that I could find) to assign IRQs manually. Ultimately, I put things back as they were, and decided to be more careful next time I buy a board. I *might* be able to force it to share an IRQ with something else. Would this be worth tampering with? > (Strange that the Promise is there in lspci but doesn't show up in > /proc/interrupts. Maybe some more knowledgeable Linux person could help > me understand why. I don't know... Since I wasn't ready to use it, I don't think I built drivers for it when I built the kernel. Might this explain the discrepancy? Also, I've done quite a bit of scouring around for information on disk cache settings. Mostly, what I find are messages asking how to set a maximum disk cache size, followed by silence, or by replies saying not to bother with it. Often the discussion quickly descends into a debate about the soundness of Linux's VM system, with the original question about the disk cache system being ignored. I did find a patch by Rik van Riel (http://surriel.com/patches/2.4/2.4.20-rmap15c) which appears to provide sysctl parameters for cache size restraints, but I'd have to download and build a 2.4.20 kernel, downgrade my module utilities, etc. Even if something else is causing my overruns now, I certainly suspect that real-time performance could be enhanced by a bit of cache settings tweaking. If anyone has any info on doing this with a 2.6.test5 kernel, I would love to get it. My curiosity has been awakened :) Thanks again for the continued help! |) |)enji Benjamin Flaming -------------------- "The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots."
