[Alsa-user] sb live dma buffer alloc failure?

[Brian J. Tarricone]

forgive me for cross-posting, but i've found references to this problem on both lists, so...

also... i wrote this email, then checked alsa-project.org, and noticed that rc7 was out... so the first part of this details my problems with rc6, and the second part rc7. sorry this is a bit long, please bear with me.

my 0.9.0_rc6 woes:

after adding another 128mb of ram to my machine (bringing the total up to 640mb), i started seeing sound problems after my system was running for a while. specifically, i'd get something along the lines of:

ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:297:(snd_pcm_hw_hw_params) SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_HW_PARAMS failed: Cannot allocate memory

(note: the pcm_hw.c line number is possibly incorrect; as i rebooted my machine i couldn't immediately reproduce the problem and so copied the error string from another user with the same problem back in november.)

i ran a search thru google, and came up with a couple posts to both these lists, dated last november. apparently (my details may be a little off) the sb live! can only make use of 29-bit addresses for DMA, which only allows access to the first 512mb of ram. to make matters worse, the snd-emu10k1 driver dynamically allocates and frees DMA memory every time an application opens and closes the pcm device, so as my machine runs longer it becomes harder to find free ram in the first 512mb of memory.

i found a patch - a hack to change the allocation method:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05382.html
unfortunately, this doesn't work on my machine. 'aplay somefile.wav' just hangs right after printing the wave file stats (sample rate, etc.), and the process refuses to die even with a 'kill -9'. this of course makes it impossible to unload the driver module, as it thinks it's being used.

so then i noticed rc7, and tried that (unpatched, fresh from the website).

things are somewhat worse. i load up xmms, and start playing mp3s. things seem fine, playing for hours until i get bored of some songs, put it on random play, and keep hitting "next song" until i find something i feel like listening to. if i press 'next' roughly once per second, after about 15-20 songs xmms locks up hard and jumps to using 100% cpu. kill -9 doesn't work, and any other app that tries to use the pcm device locks as well. i have to reboot to fix it.

anyone have any ideas?

thanks,
brian



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