These are general Dell laptop problems, and so far as I can tell, there's
no solution yet to either. Audio is quite hard (except to get apps to use
bigger buffers; try googling for 'hammerfall cardbus dell', it's a common
problem).
This page:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-hw2.html
may contain a solution to the audio issue, too, I just discovered.
The clock problem is something Linux should deal with. Like to look into
it? I can help somewhat.
Andrew
--On Tuesday, January 14, 2003 01:14:31 -0500 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> A while back, I reported nasty sound distortion/echoing problems
> on a C840. Well, this is a follow-up that I found the cause of the
> problem...
>
> I was also running gkrellm, with it's APM monitor activated. Whenever
> it read from /proc/apm, this would cause a call to the BIOS down in
> apm_get_power_status(). As near as I can tell, on this particular Dell,
> calling the APM drops interrupts on the floor even if you run with
> CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS. Another effect of this was a badly drifting
> clock (which is how I found this in the first place) - doing a
> a 'grep timer /proc/interrupts', waiting 4 or 5 minutes of wall clock
> time, doing it again, and doing the math showed only 980 or so interrupts
> per second. The clock drift exhibits itself under 2.4.18 as well,
> but it wasn't breaking audio.
>
> My guess is that the 2.4 driver for the i810 audio is a bit more tolerant
> of the occasional dropped interrupt (it seems to like to keep a lot of
> data already queued in the ring buffer), but the 2.5 driver runs in much
> more 'just in time' mode. As a result, if the kernel gets suspended while
> we monkey around in the BIOS, we get a data underrun, causing my problems.
>
> For what it's worth, the i8k plugin for gkrellm also causes clock drift,
> but doesn't seem to upset the audio driver.
>
> (OK, so it's not as glorious as debugging APIC issues on a NUMAQ system.
> On the other hand, there's probably a lot more Latitudes out there than
> NUMAQ boxes, and more importantly to *me*, I have to deal with this
> particular Latitude 8-10 hours a day. And somebody made a comment about
> open source being driven to scratch itches... ;)
>
> /Valdis
>
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