Alsa crashes, takes half of kernel (2.6.10 vanilla) with it

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

Hi
I've got Linux 2.6.10 vanilla and it randomly crashes on playing sound on my sblive with alsa.
After it crashed, it's not possible to play any sound any more. If any process tries to, it immediately freezes to death (can't be killed; even with killall -9).

But there's also another side effect: Certain utilities, like ps aux, netstat -nptl, fuser also crash, as well as the the initscript of lisa (when shutting down). Those processes, although they don't have anything to do with sound, still freeze to death. On the other side, things like pstree or top do not freeze (at least not immediately)

Any Idea what I could do?

Greetings,
Wolfgang

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

Hi,

is it possible to remove the alsa modules with rmmod ?
Are there any related entries in /var/log/messages ?
Are there any related entires in dmesg ?
Is it always, is it reproducable ?
Is your APIC enabled/disabled ?
Have you plugged the Soundblaster card into another slot ? What then ?
Have you tried another kernel release ?

dsd · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 12:09 pm Post subject:

i had similar problems with my sb live. ended up taking it out and using my onboard sound.
a while later i put it in my sisters computer, which didnt run linux at that time, and it caused that machine to go mad too. i binned the sb live and got a new one.
_________________
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

I've alsa compiled into the kernel, i'll try to use it as modules
everything worked ok until 2.6.7, then i upgraded to 2.6.10 and now it crashes. (so I think it's unlikely to be a problem with the pci-slot?)
i've got X86_UP_APIC=Y and X86_UP_IOAPIC=Y

I haven't found a way to exactly reproduce it yet. I just keep playing sound and after some hours it freezes, today it happened even after a few minutes.

As for the logs: I'll have to wait for the next crash; unfortunately I forgot to add the kernel logger to the startup scripts.

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

Is/are the APIC's really used (have a look in dmesg) ?

When it worked in 2.6.7 and stopped working with 2.6.10, have you had a look in the changelogs of 2.6.8, 2.6.9 and 2.6.10, wether there have been alsa/sound blaster related changes ?

There is a sb live in my box for 3 years or so, I have never had any issues with it, but I have not tested with a 2.6 kernel. Last time I booted 2.6.10-r?, it blew away my grub boot record, and totally corrupted / and /boot, so I had to recover my box over several hours :evil:

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

escitalopram@jana escitalopram $ dmesg | grep -i APIC
Found and enabled local APIC!
mapped APIC to ffffd000 (fee00000)

<still waiting for the next crash>

looking for emu10k1 i found:

in 2.6.9-changelog:

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

it crashed again... there's nothing about it in the kernel logs ;(((

i'm recompiling it with alsa as modules
also removing the via driver vor my onboard sound, it's not really working anyway

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

I recompiled alsa with verbose printk

now it says

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

jesus

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

It seems that alsa doesn't crash anymore, now that i've compiled it as modules; but now i have a quite weird problem: the alsasound-initscripts loads normally at startup, but sound doesn't work until i do an /etc/init.d/alsasound restart ?!!!! i have my alsasound in the boot-runlevel and i'm using udev

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

have you had a look at the settings of the mixer after the start of your box, before the restart of alsa ?

escitalopram · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 60

Ok, I give up.
Compiling alsa as modules didn't help,
Compiling alsa-driver neither did, it still crashed.
I removed the driver and now I'm running on-board sound.
Maybe it's really a hardware issue.

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

you could only get as much info about this prob, and have a look into alsa's mailinglists, wether you can find anybody who can help you. Or file a bugreport in Gentoos bugzilla

RKleemann · n00b Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 23

Darn, I just found this thread and I seem to have very similar symptoms. Here's the relevant data:

# lspci | grep audio
0000:00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 06)

The computer was running various versions of redhat for 7 years. The audio worked fine on both the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. After the fedora fiasco I decided to stop upgrading the machine at version 9. I then discovered gentoo and started installing it on newer machines. Then in January I decided to reinstall gentoo on this old machine.

I get very similar bewhavior as the original poster. Sound sometimes works. Then after a while it craps out and "/etc/init.d/alsasound restart" often fixes it. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to reboot to get the sound working. I've never had hangs but I have seen laggy behavior in some apps such as ps. I never suspected it was related to the sound card.

I'm running 2.6.10-gentoo-r6, udev, sound kernel modules as modules.

--- modules.conf excerpt ---
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore

##
## IMPORTANT:
## You need to customise this section for your specific sound card(s)
## and then run `update-modules' command.
## Read alsa-driver's INSTALL file in /usr/share/doc for more info.
##
## ALSA portion
## alias snd-card-0 snd-interwave
## alias snd-card-1 snd-ens1371
## OSS/Free portion
## alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
## alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
##
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
alias snd-slot-0 snd-card-0

# OSS/Free portion - card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
## OSS/Free portion - card #2
## alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss
## alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss
## alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss

alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

# Set this to the correct number of cards.
options snd cards_limit=1

--- end modules.conf ---

Any suggestions? Should I try running the release candidate 2.6.11 kernel or is that mindless busywork?

Robert.

GungHo · Apprentice Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 254

Hi,

at a first glance your modules.conf looks fine. Here is mine:

bendis · n00b Joined: 06 Nov 2002 Posts: 15

Hi there!
I have the same problems as described. Sometimes an application using sound hangs and cannot be killed (uninterruptible sleep). All other processes which try to open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p fall to uninterruptible sleep too - during syscall open("/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p", O_RDWR). The problems started with kernel 2.6.10 (2.6.9 was OK), now I'm running gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.11-r4 and it still hangs. And I have no SB Live, but integrated VIA (snd_via82xx).

modules.conf: