FYI I have checked around TRIUMF for soundcards. We have chips by C-Media, Creative Labs, Ensoniq, ESS, Intel, nVidia and VIA - a total of 29 different types/revisions, using 11 different drivers. Most of these are OSS from the stock RedHat installation, with a few Alsa from FC3 or that I've just upgraded by hand. The most common units are Ensoniq 1371, Intel i810 and C-Media CM8738
Of those that I've checked, Creative Labs "sb" and "audigy" show reasonable CPU load using the OSS driver. The cmpci, es1371 and i810_audio show near 100% CPU load for ratmedia in system state with the OSS driver, and probably block the AG VenueClient on single-CPU systems. I have built Alsa drivers for the systems we use for AG, but maintainability is a problem. Note that rat works with OSS, it's just that it consumes CPU. This doesn't seem to be a particular problem with applications such as Mozilla or Sun java used in VRVS, but it gums up the venue client. -- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time) secur...@triumf.ca
