Re: [Alsa-user] Audio drop-out with ac3 on iec958 during heavy SATA io

[Lee R. <rlr...@jo...>]

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 18:13 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> Well, you've seen the xrun detection there, so it's basically the
> problem of other parts, such as disk contoller driver.  That is,
> something else takes too long time, and the irq for sound can't be
> handled at the right time.
> 
> If the preempt option doesn't solve the problem, I'd recommend you to
> consult on LKML.
> 

Does this help?

    # echo 64 > /sys/block/hdc/queue/max_sectors_kb

Replace hdc with sda or whatever the kernel calls your disk and repeat
for all disks.

It's still a bug IMHO if this is needed, but might make your system
usable until the SATA maintainers fix it.

Lee