[14:03] <Iamthehuman1> Any news on when we can begin testing 22.04? I mean that an release candidate or beta .iso comes out
[15:05] <OvenWerks> Iamthehuman1: feature freeze is end of the month. ( Eickmeyer 27th?) so testing should be possible from then.
[15:06] <OvenWerks> Iamthehuman1: I installed 22.04 about a month ago and am using it as my daily drive so it is solid enough from what I can tell.
[15:40] <mrz80> Cool
[15:45] <OvenWerks> there can be a lot of daily updates still... 239 this morning
[17:05] <Eickmeyer> OvenWerks, Iamthehuman1: Feature Freeze is the 24th.
[17:06] <OvenWerks> Eickmeyer: 7 and 4 kinda look the same ;)
[17:07] <Eickmeyer> Heh
[17:11] <mrz80> Looking forward to new-and-improved :D      I've been having the time of my life the last few weeks, settling new gear into the home studio and trying to beat my XRUN monster of a decrpit old machine into glitch-free shape :)
[17:12] <mrz80> Jacked my cpu from 2.someething 6 core to a 4GHz 8 core, upped the memory from 12 to 16, went all-SSD at long last.
[17:13] <mrz80> Made  a major breakthru a week or so ago when someone suggested making sure the USB audio adapter was on a bus/controller all by itself. That eliminated abou 80% of the XRUNs
[17:19] <OvenWerks> Stability is hard and often not very intuitive
[17:21] <OvenWerks> For example, I have found better stability with the cpu running at .8Ghz than set to 3.*Ghz if ondemand or power save is running.
[17:21] <mrz80> One problem I have is that I can't just dedicate the machine to music. It's also my ham shack computer and my work-from-home machine, so things like Internet access and near constant presence of a VPN client are just givens.
[17:22] <OvenWerks> intel's boost can cause xruns as well. basically any cpu speed change (particularly in the diown direction) can cause xruns
[17:23] <mrz80> This is an AMD FX8350.  I recently did a headache-inducing deep-dive into the FX architecture when I was looking at options for upgrading my wife's PC, and I wonder if the FX's oddball internal architecture is maybe causing me some heartache.
[17:23] <mrz80> It's got some pretty sincere bottlenecks owing to the way pairs of cores share significant slices of silicon.
[17:23] <OvenWerks> more than one thread per core would seem to help (130% "performance") but I have found in the past that it gives xruns below a certain latency setting.
[17:25] <mrz80> That's a big thing; I ether have to jack the buffering up to "latency is painful" or  dial it down to "peformanace is acceptable but the glitches from XRUNS are a semi constant headache :(
[17:25] <OvenWerks> Things like auto software updates can cause xruns. If I am doing serious recording I will stop cron
[17:26] <mrz80> If I'm recording ore reharsing stuff I shut down the VPN and kill anything I can find that's not in use (things like Slack, Zoom, email, etc)
[17:26] <mrz80> Still get hiccups.  According to HTOP, the machine DOES spend a lot of time in the Xserver, which I attribute to my ancient GT730 :D
[17:26] <OvenWerks> I have been able to run this firewire audio with jack set to 16/2 for over 48 hours with no xruns.
[17:28] <OvenWerks> thats with an i5 (4 cores, 4 threads) at 3.2Ghz. That is still having a browser open and watching youtube stuff.
[17:30] <OvenWerks> FW is on it's own PCIe card (something I would recomend for USB devices too) with the irq prioritized
 "I have been able to run this..." <- That's nuts! Awesome
[17:32] <MoonsofMoons[m]> I get xruns if I think too hard about setting my buffer to 16..
[17:32] <OvenWerks> I have found it hard on newer motherboards to get an audio device (or any usb port) on a separate irq without installing an extra PICe USB card. USB3.0 should be able to make this better as it is basically an extended PCI connector
[17:33] <OvenWerks> USB devices will never run at 16/2 because they cycle at 1ms
[17:34] <OvenWerks> this means at 48000 16/3 would be the lowest it would work at all (with xruns)
[17:34] <OvenWerks> for usb devices 32/* is the practical minimum
[17:35] <MoonsofMoons[m]> Unfortunately my main machine cannot accept extra cards. It's a small Lenovo Thinkcentre
[17:35] <OvenWerks> With the cheap ones I have for testing... 64/2 works ok :)
[17:36] <MoonsofMoons[m]> OvenWerks: That's a pretty inperceptable delay anyhow 
[17:36] <OvenWerks> I can understand that, that is part of having a laptop
[17:36] <MoonsofMoons[m]> It's a 'desktop' but one of those little things designed to mount behind a TV, etc
[17:37] <OvenWerks> Ah, same thing really.
[17:37] <MoonsofMoons[m]> Yeah. The MOBO is probably based off laptop tech
[17:38] <OvenWerks> mostly as things get smaller, cooling becomes the limiting factor
[17:40] <MoonsofMoons[m]> It performs well enough. Older i3 with 16GB RAM. I run 128/2 and only get xruns when running a lot of yabridge VSTs
[17:41] <OvenWerks> sounds pretty good then.
[17:42] <MoonsofMoons[m]> Yeah. Works for my needs
[18:08] <mrz80> Alas, I've never gotten my machine to recognize and use my firewire interface.
[18:09] <mrz80> I can't get below 256/3 without xruns becoming near constant. It's aggravating.
[18:13] <OvenWerks> I do have to use the ffado jack backend. If I use the ALSA back end for my FW device I have to run at 1024/2
 "I can't get below 256/3 without..." <- This could be something pipewire fixes. You could try running live install of a distro that uses PW by default to test out performance 
[18:25] <MoonsofMoons[m]> * This could be something pipewire fixes. You could try running live session of a distro that uses PW by default to test out performance 
[18:29] <OvenWerks> PW possibly as an option in 22.10 or 23.04
[18:30] <OvenWerks> but PW does not load the ffado backend. It is ALSA only, so not a fix in this case
[18:31] <OvenWerks> (ALSA fw drivers are not usable really)
[18:36] <mrz80> Current backports of US installed Pipewire some time ago
[18:36] <OvenWerks> mrz80: yes but the controlability for use as a jack server is lacking
[18:37] <OvenWerks> getting pw to use jack as a device or act as desktop with bridging to jack is not easy
 "but PW does not load the ffado..." <- ffado is a kernel level ALSA alternative? 
[18:47] <OvenWerks> Sort of.
[18:47] <OvenWerks> Actually I am not sure
[18:47] <OvenWerks> it may be a userland backend for jack that uses the kernels raw fw if
[18:50] <MoonsofMoons[m]> Interesting
[18:52] <OvenWerks> lsmod does not list any ffado modules so userspace