freebsd stable - Oct 2006 - vmstat -i output after solving snd problems.

Hello,
I use FreeBSD STABLE on Acer Aspire 1525, with VIA K8M400 chipset and 
VIA1612A on-motherboard sound card.

I've beet tracing STABLE from some time ago, and at some point of 5.X 
series my sound started to be distorted (clicks, lags, metallic sounds) 
in a random manner, with distortions correlated with network/disk activity.
(This was reported before -- kern/81599, and some posts here and there)

After setting hint.pcm.0.buffersize to a bigger value and applying 
patches from 	http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/  (BTW: contrary to the 
message there, these don't seem to be MFC'ed (?)) the sound distortions 
were completely simultaneous with network activity. Neither CPU load 
(and acpi_perf changing the cpu speed) nor high disk i/o (unpacking 
sources, making /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb) affected the sound, but 
only as I entered IRC or openned some pages in a browser I did hear 
clicks and lags.
Apparently the reason was  pcm0 and re0 (Ethernet card) sharing one irq.

By setting a different IRQ for some of devices in BIOS and turning off 
APIC, I got a new irq layout which gives pcm0 an exclusive IRQ.
I rejoiced, because the sound is perfect now.

However, I have few questions:

1) Is turning off APIC a disadvantage? (I have read the wikipedia page 
on IO-APIC and I the machine is uniprocessor)
Will it bring my performance down? Or do other scary things to me?
Maybe there is a better way to force different IRQ layout.

2) vmstat -i now shows:
interrupt                          total       rate
irq0: clk                        6824889        968
irq1: atkbd0                       13103          1
irq4: sio0                             2          0
irq7: ppc0                            71          0
irq8: rtc                         890176        126
irq9: nvidia0 cbb*                464262         65
irq10: cbb0 uhci1*                     3          0
irq11: ndis0 re0+                 130633         18
irq12: psm0                       597273         84
irq14: ata0                       118892         16
irq15: ata1                           74          0
Total                            9039378       1283

Does it look normal? What do '*' and '+' after device names
mean?
I couldn't find this information in man vmstat, google or even quich 
grep through vmstat.c. What am I missing?
Is there something to be worried about this?


Thank's for Your time and sorry for crossposting to -multimedia@ (some 
people searching it might (?) find this post helpful).

Regards,

m.

Quoting Marcin Koziej <creep@desk.pl> (Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:08:20 +0200):
> After setting hint.pcm.0.buffersize to a bigger value and applying 
> patches from 	http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/  (BTW: contrary to the 
> message there, these don't seem to be MFC'ed (?))
MFCed to FreeBSD 6, but not to FreeBSD 5.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
He felt as if he'd been shipwrecked on the Titanic but in the nick of time
had been rescued. By the Lusitania.
(Mort)
http://www.Leidinger.net  Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org     netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137

On Sunday 01 October 2006 12:08, Marcin Koziej wrote:
> 2) vmstat -i now shows:
> interrupt                          total       rate
> irq0: clk                        6824889        968
> irq1: atkbd0                       13103          1
> irq4: sio0                             2          0
> irq7: ppc0                            71          0
> irq8: rtc                         890176        126
> irq9: nvidia0 cbb*                464262         65
> irq10: cbb0 uhci1*                     3          0
> irq11: ndis0 re0+                 130633         18
> irq12: psm0                       597273         84
> irq14: ata0                       118892         16
> irq15: ata1                           74          0
> Total                            9039378       1283
> 
> Does it look normal? What do '*' and '+' after device names
mean?
> I couldn't find this information in man vmstat, google or even quich 
> grep through vmstat.c. What am I missing?
> Is there something to be worried about this?
Nothing to worry about.  It means that there are more devices that couldn't
be
fit into the available space for the name.  A + means there is one more 
device on this IRQ and there wasn't enough room for its name.  A * means 
there are 2 or more devices on this IRQ and there wasn't enough room for 
their names.

-- 
John Baldwin