[tlug] troubleshooting alsa in kde

[scott <scott@example.com>]

Hi everyone,

A while back I posted a problem that I was having- to sum up, xmms and
other audio players kept crashing my system (centos4 on dual core
amd64). The audio file would play fine, but then at the end of the file
the entire system would freeze. Also, if during the middle of an audio
file playback, you killed the process, again the system would freeze.
Then after physically rebooting there would always be errors saying
the /tmp partition had not been properly unmounted etc, and I would have
to fsck to get it to boot.

To troubleshoot this problem, I tried disabling selinux, playing with
BIOS sound related settings, I tried running audio programs in non kde
environment, and also tried doing an strace on the process xmms while it
was running. Strace did give me some error but I was capturing to sdout
and don't remember it exactly- something about a bad descriptor.

Anyway, I tried changing xmms from alsa to oss, and the problem
disappeared. Strace doesn't show the errors, and I can kill the process
without the system freezing, so I think it can be concluded this is an
alsa bug. I looked around the bugtracker for something resembling this
error but wasn't able to find anything.

Any tips on troubleshooting alsa? For the time being I will use oss, but
since everyone seems to be migrating towards alsa I'd like to
investigate this weird phenomena. 

Cheers,

Scott VanDusen

P.S. It was really cool to meet a bunch of you Tluggers at the last
nomikai.