after reading lee's email i had to try this kernel.. so i went over to www.de.kernel.org, grabbed 2.6.8-rc1 and patched it up with this patch: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0407.1/1453.html On first sight it looks very good. many of the sporadic xruns i experienced with jack in RT mode are gone. even a "find /" parallel to a "make bzImage" seems not to provoke any xruns [i use ext3]. But: i use fluxbox and it supports desktop wheeling [switching desktop via scrollwheel - very handy] and doing this excessively and rapidly provokes xruns easily. Also starting mozilla just provoked an xrun.. Well to provie more detailed info i thought i'd turn on xrun tracing. So here are the steps i took: 1] enabled debugging in the alsa drivers [i did that when i built the 2.6.8rc1mm1 kernel and the included alsa modules. 2] mango:/home/tapas# echo 1 > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/xrun_debug mango:/home/tapas# echo 1 > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/xrun_debug 3] started jackd -R -d alsa -p 512 and provoked xruns, but the traces are nowhere to be found.. where should i look? /var/log/messages - nothin; /var/log/debug - nothing; /var/log/dmesg - nothing.. Maybe i'm just stooopid here.. Please enlighten me. Thanks, Flo -- Palimm Palimm! Sounds/Ware: http://affenbande.org/~tapas/