Lock ups, crashes, and bad artsd

Message

Flandry · Post by **Flandry** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:02 am

I thought i'd take a longshot that the weird problems my box has developed would mean something to one of you. Audio has weird problems in KDE that developed sometime after i updated to 3.3 (it worked fine in 3.2). If i play a video with atun, it will cause a crash before, or after, of artsd. If a flash ad pops up in a webpage that includes audio, it will also sometimes crash, and sometimes nspluginviewer keeps running, leaking memory and until i'll come back to find my system churning virtual memory constantly.

I'm not sure what will fix this. I thought emerging 3.3.2 (up from 3.3.1) would perhaps fix it, but it didn't. I also unmerged artsd and remerged it. Where might the problem be, and what might i do to fix it?

Thanks

_never_ · Post by **_never_** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:07 am

Post your CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.

Flandry · Post by **Flandry** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:11 am

There's really not been a lot done to the /etc/make.conf file since i installed gentoo six months ago. Here's most of it:

Code: Select all

CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
USE="mmx sse alsa cups ppds usb kde qt gnome gtk mysql pda"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

_never_ · Post by **_never_** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:32 am

You might want to try running artsd as a realtime process, but this would require you to start it as root. It doesn't need to run as root, but it needs to be started as root. I don't know exactly how to do this. Maybe you'll need some wrapper program for this. Search the forums or Google. And about your CFLAGS, I recommend the following setup for your machine:

Code: Select all

CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -mfpmath=sse -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

Give it a try. But you will need to rebuild at least glibc, coreutils and the CPU-consuming programs like mplayer/atun (I prefer the former) to notice any difference. I also recommend rebuilding X, gcc and the binutils. However, it won't help about your artsd problem. If you ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86", stop doing it and remerge artsd and atun.

wjholden · Post by **wjholden** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 7:03 am

I hate arts. No offense to the developers, but somehow it crashes all the time and throws error messages at me all the time. For this reason, I would add "-arts" to your USE flags and then recompile KDE (emerge kde) without arts support, then using the KDE Control Panel force KDE to use the real Alsamixer (you might not have to change anything, in fact...just see if it works already).

Maybe I shouldn't mention this, but I hate nforce2 sound also. I finally gave up on it after fighting both the ALSA and OSS drivers in the kernel for a long time and trying to configure sound applications (mostly Kaffeine, XMMS, Xine, and UT2004) to work with it. Since then I found an old Ensoniq sound card that's fully supported in the kernel and using OSS works great (for one application at a time, sometimes mixing works but usually I have to close XMMS before using other noisy applications). Rock on OSS! Deprecated my ass...

_never_ · Post by **_never_** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:04 am

Well, I don't like Arts as well, but when it comes to sound servers, Arts would be my first choice. I like JACK also, but there aren't many programs supporting it. If you don't need network transparency, you can try the dmix plugin of ALSA. However, I've never got it to work. It's hell complicated. But when it works, you don't need sound servers anymore. Then ALSA does the mixing work and your programs can just use native ALSA.

Flandry · Post by **Flandry** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 3:17 am

destuxor wrote:I hate arts. No offense to the developers, but somehow it crashes all the time and throws error messages at me all the time. For this reason, I would add "-arts" to your USE flags and then recompile KDE (emerge kde) without arts support, then using the KDE Control Panel force KDE to use the real Alsamixer (you might not have to change anything, in fact...just see if it works already).

Maybe i'll try it. At this point i don't have a lot to lose, since actual KDE sounds have not worked, even sporadically, since i upgraded to 3.3. It's not clear to me why the kernel-level sound server or whatever level alsa is doesn't do all the mixing anyway. Which decade are we living in again?

wjholden · Post by **wjholden** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 3:26 am

Be sure to come back and tell the world how this worked for you. The forum isn't much of a knowledge base without follow-up reports. Thanks.

Really, since you've already got KDE installed that shouldn't take too awfully long (still something to do while sleeping) . Hope it goes well!

_never_ · Post by **_never_** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 3:40 am

Flandry wrote:It's not clear to me why the kernel-level sound server or whatever level alsa is doesn't do all the mixing anyway. Which decade are we living in again?

ALSA is directly in the kernel. It does not do the mixing, because it is Linux. Linux follows the Unix tradition of separating every tiny thing into a separate process to make it flexible and fast. That's also one of the main reasons why Linux is a lot faster and a lot more flexible than Windows, if handled properly. Another advantage is that you can take those little puzzle pieces and put them together like you want. In Windows, there are no pieces. There is just the big solid end product as a whole and you can use it as a whole only.

racoontje · Post by **racoontje** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 6:57 am

That has nothing to do with division of monolithic projects into small, manageable ones. That wouldn't explain why ALSA doesn't give us a proper (ie arts quality) mixing daemon.

_never_ · Post by **_never_** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 7:00 am

It does: the dmix plugin. But it's a plugin and not directly part of the ALSA core.