Re: 2.0.28 breaks gus sound

Zygo Blaxell (zblaxell@myrus.com)
17 Jan 1997 01:56:53 -0500

In article <Pine.LNX.3.91.970116093703.526G-100000@voxware>,
Hannu Savolainen <hannu@voxware.pp.fi> wrote:
>On Wed, 15 Jan 1997 shendrix@escape.widomaker.com wrote:
>> I've had some trouble with playing wav files, and since kernel 2.0.18,
>> I have not been able to record any sound with my GUS at all. Mixer quit
>> working too, or at least doesn't not work as it should.
>The GUS driver has not changed at all since early 2.0.x versions (2.0.10
>or so). In fact it has remained almost unchanged since Linux 1.0.x days.

The only problem I've been having with sound (/proc/version: Linux
version 2.0.27 (zblaxell@elmer.myrus.com) (gcc version 2.7.2) #1 Mon
Dec 2 20:59:57 EST 1996) is the occasional "/dev/dsp: Out of memory".

It seems to be something to do with the 16 megabyte DMA barrier; if I
allocate a lot of RAM and release it (say with 'dd obs=124m </dev/zero |
head -c1'), I can get sound working again. This applies to the GUS,
GUS MAX, and SB16.

The bug makes sound completely unusable on a machine with 128 megs of RAM;
it takes about five minutes to swap things out of the "bottom" 16 megs,
and less than a second for all that memory to fill up again.

-- 
Zygo Blaxell. Unix/soft/hardware/firewall/security guru. 10th place, ACM Intl 
Prog Contest, 1995. Admin Linux+Solaris for food, Tshirts, anime. Pager: 1613
7608572. "I gave up $1000 to avoid working on windoze... *sigh*"-Amy Fong. "smb
is a microsoft toy, like a "child" protocol that never matured"-S Boisjoli.