sound and chipset confusion
 

Im trying to figure out if everything is working as well as it could...I HAVE sound it works fine BUT when I check kde info center it says
installed drivers type 10=alsa emulation
card config:no sound card

this confuses me?? soundcard is sblive and I see it picked up when I boot..however when using any audio app: xmms or kaffiene cpu usage spikes heavy..this leads me to believe Im not using something properly and its going thru software emulation instead of hardware or am I way off here??

also I have ata 100 hd and ata 100 chipset and hdparm sees drive as udma5 but transfer rate is only 29mb ...thats the same as my ata66 computer I know Im not going to get 100mb..but around 40-50 would be expected as thats what I get in m$ according to hdtach

How did you meassure disk performance ??

Check if you have kdemultimedia3-mixer package installed.

I have had it but there was a terrible noise when KDE was started. So I removed
kdemultimedia3-mixer and have only ALSA left. Somehow KDE Mixer and ALSA
Mixer could not stand each other :-))

BTW: Can you start kamix ?

hd perfomance measured with hd parm
as I said sound is working BUT maybe in some sort of software emulation??

UDMA is the bus transfer performance. If your drive is not capable of delivering more then 30 MB/s then
a faster bus will not make it faster either.

Keep in mind that hdparm -tT is *not* a benchmark.

So you may try follwing simple test (assuming /dev/hda is your drive).

In one console start:
time dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=64k count=16384
and in another console window start
iostat 2 -k

You can online watch how your read performance is.

You may also check your drive setting in
/proc/ide/ideX/hdY

where X represents your IDE Controller or Channel (e.g. ide0, ide1)
and Y represents your drive (e.g. hda, hdb)

there you will find a file called "settings"

Take a look if cache is enabled.

Also take a look on the output of hdparm -a /dev/hdY

It will give you the number of how many blocks are read ahead.

Depending on your drive 29 MB/s might be the maximum value you can get.
What is the type of your drive and what the rotation speed (e.g. 7200 rpm) ?

iostat 2 -k =no such command??
drive is a maxtor 20 gig 7200 rpm
read ahead is 256

""You may also check your drive setting in
/proc/ide/ideX/hdY""

all documents in that directory are empty 0 byte,and yes I changed x and y

and as I said in windows with hd tach which is a hd benchmark I get around 42mb/s

any idea about the alsa thing??

Hi,

from that what I can understand it looks like you are using OSS (Open Sound System) instead of ALSA. It may be
that your KDE is configured to use OSS instead of ALSA. ALSA however can emulate OSS and I assume
that KDE is going through this OSS Emulation.

In my case xmms also uses the OSS output plugin, so I also use OSS emulation for xmms, but I do not see
any CPU untilization increase.

I suggest you take a look on KDE control Center -> "Sound & Multimedia" -> "Sound System"

Click on the right-hand window the "Hardware" Tab.

Take a look on the "Select the audio device" Setting. Select there "Autodetect" or "Advanced Linux Audio System"

iostat is a standard UNIX/Linux Commad.

I *think* that in Debian it is part of the sysstat package. So check if you have installed it.
If not install it.

You may also log in as root and tinvoke iostat.

It may be that the path to iostat command is not in your PATH variable.

In my case iostat is located under /usr/bin.

So as non-root user I have to invoke: /usr/bin/iostat

About the file size in /proc/ide/ideX/hdaY being 0.

It does not matter what file size is shown. You shall be able to perform a
cat /proc/ide/ideX/hdaY
However you need root access in order to display the content of the files located there.

Remmeber /proc is a pseudo filesystem, so the file size displayed in /proc is not the same like the size
of files located in a "normal. Filesystem.

You say your drive size is 20 GB ? Is it 20 GB or 200 GB ?

Take a look on the "Select the audio device" Setting. Select there "Autodetect" or "Advanced Linux Audio System"

auto detect..If i choose alsa i get no sound
will check on sysstat
and its twenty gig hd


if i type /proc/ide/ide0/hda at root console i get:
/proc/ide/ide0/hda: is a directory

I have checked the performance data from hdtach 2.7 with my drives and the average value is pritty much the same as the value
hdparm -tT delivers.
By the way, I do not trust all the values hdtach delivers.
I think that for a 20 GB drive 29 MB/s is a very good value.
Here for comparison
Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm 120 GB: hdparm 37.64 MB/s hdtach: max. 45.5 MB/s min: 15.2 average: 36.0 MB/s
Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm 200 GB: hdparm 61.24 MB/s hdtach: max. 65.5 MB/s min: 35.4 average: 58.0 MB/s
Bigger drives have a higher data desinity so with the same angle speed (7200 rpm) you simply read more data
within one rotation, that's why bigger drives have a higher sequential throghput.
keep in mind that you have 20 GB which is about 1/6 of 120 GB.

Still if you think that you can achieve even higher throughput take a look on your settings either with:
a) hdparm -I
(you may also take a look on the hdparm manpage: man hdparm)
or
b) cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings

As for the sound:
1) Check if your card is ALSA supported:
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...dor=All#matrix

Find there your card and click on the Detail Field. There are some additional explanations.

2) It may be that your ALSA Version does not have a native support for your card.
Take a look on the lsmod output. The ALSA card drivers start with snd_
E.G.
snd_ac97_codec 55556 1 snd_emu10k1
I have a Creative Soundblaster Live and the driver is snd_emu10k1.

3) Enable ALSA Output in xmms and check if it plays:
Right Click on XMMS Windows and then:
Options-> Preferences
Then select as output plugin: ALSA
Restrat then xmms

4) It may also be that your aRts (the default KDE Soundsystem) has problems with ALSA

Check: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=186360

its a soundblaster live so its supported after much googling it appears to be more of a hassle to get alsa running properly especially since sound does work...anyway I upgraded from sarge to sid and it seems to have given me more of the performance I was looking for compared to xp anyway....still think its odd that in kde infocenter>sound
installed drivers: type 10 alsa emulation
card config:no soundcards
audio devices:not enabled

but as i said sound does work so???