Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 55196
[binary only module] Output of sound through Esound causes hard lockup
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:48 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5+) Gecko/20011023 Description of problem: accessing hard disk while using Aureal Vortex drivers (see freshmeat) results in lockup and severe corruption of hard disk. journaling (obviously) does no good in this case. i recovered around 70 percent of data drive (20GB of 29) after around 24 hours using various recovery tools. for the average user this would have been a total loss. my guess is that this is an interupt-sharing problem. i believe the Vortex card may share an interrupt with the Promise IDE controller. however, moving the card to another slot and resetting configuration data had no affect (problem still reproduceable). problem did not occur with my previous Linux box (also contains a Vortex card), and, since it was running Roswell, one can assume it is the difference in motherboard hardware. the current Linux box used to be my Win2000 box, where there were no problems with the vortex. to the very knowledgeable, the Aureal Vortex is the preffered card as the amplification on other cards (especially Creative cards) produces unnacceptable clipping and crossover distortion. in addition, the Vortex II has an on-board passive equalizer. no one is in the same ballpark as the Vortex for fidelity. this problem needs to be fixed quickly. thanks, alvin thompson Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.install RH7.2 2.install Aureal Vortex OSS driver 1.1.2 3.produce continuous sound (i.e. play MP3) 4.access hard disk (click on Mozilla icon) Actual Results: lockup/corruption. hard disk can be corrupted even if no write operations were occurring. locks up every time. corrupts data most of the time. Additional info: current Linux box (problem): Redhat 7.2 (2.4.7)(Enigma) Asus A7V (Via KT133 chipset) Athlon 1GHz 512MB AGP Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS 32MB PCI Aureal Vortex II (AU8830A2) Tulip 21140 (eth0) Tulip 21041 (eth1) main IDE system primary master - Maxtor 20GB (root) slave - Western Digital 3.1 GB (swap) secondary master - Creative 5x DVD ROM slave - Acer CDRW (10x/4x/32x) Promise ATA100 IDE controller (NOT set to RAID) primary master - Maxtor 30GB (mounted as /data) ***corrupted*** previous Linux Box (ran fine): Redhat 7.19x (Roswell) FIC(?) K6XV3+ (Via MVP3(?) chipset) K6-2 400MHz 192MB AGP Riva TNT2 32MB PCI Aureal Vortex II (AU8830A2) Tulip 21140 (eth0) Tulip 21041 (eth1) main IDE system primary master - Maxtor 30GB (root) slave - Western Digital 3.1 GB (swap) secondary master - generic 24x CD ROM
placing the card in slot 3, which does not share interrupts, does not help. /proc/interrupts looks fine. the only thing sharing interrupts now are netwark cards. i guess it's not an interrupt problem.
Well the binary only module from aureal was written for 2.2; the 2.4 interrupt mechanisms are quite different so I'm not really suprised it doesn't work....
interesting that there are vortex game port drivers built into the kernel but no sound drivers...
That's because that driver is open source; most likely Aureal gave out specs... they never did this for the sound part unfortionatly.
problem also happens using SBLive sound card, although it takes much longer (mean time between lockups is around 36-48 hours of constant disk usage and sound output). this may be a different bug as it takes much longer and the hard drive doesn't seem to be as corrupted as with Vortex. setting the output pluggin in XMMS to OSS instead of ARTS (or ESS for the not-so-bright) seems to make the problem more likely. i have done a clean install, swapped slots/interrupts, recompiled the kernel, removed the NVidia driver, and removed the Promise IDE driver and the hard disk. Problem still occurs. as you can see from the description above, this is pretty much a vanilla system. so if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. since the problem also occurs with the relatively-common SBLive and involves loss of data i recommend increasing the priority to something more appriate. feel free to contact me for more information.
there are actually two different problems which cause the lockups: there is the vortex problem, as above, and also if any program tries to output sound through ESD it causes occasional hard lockups, although not as likely to cause disk corruption. the latter problem happens regardless of the type of sound card. i have two systems and the latter problem occurs on both. the only 3 things they have in common are assus a7v motherboards (different revisions), athlon processors (different speeds), and maxtor hard drives (different sizes).
forgot to mention both computers run fine with Mandrake Linux and its version of esound.
How did this end up on esound instead of kernel?
SB Live should be fixed. The binary stuff is a WONTFIX. Please re-open the bug if current errata havent solved it for you with SB Live