I am using opensuse leap 15.3 with KDE plasma 5.18.6 and kernel 5.3.18.
Whenever I use a USB dac or sound card, my audio randomly cuts out for very short intervals (less than a second) frequently. Usually happens when I minimize/maximize any application window, switching tabs rapidly in firefox, when scrolling websites like reddit etc.
It doesn’t usually happen if I am not doing anything on my pc except just watching a video or listening to music.
Also the issue doesn’t happen with onboard audio or audio through HDMI.
Issue happened with a Tempotec sonata HD pro that runs just out of USB and the issue also happened with a ASUS SDRW-S1 powered dac/sound card. With the powered dac though, the audio doesn’t cut out like with my Tempotec sonata HD pro but i hear crackling when doing the same things.
And the issue doesn’t happen if I disable the comnpositor or switch to Xrender as the rendering backend instead of OpenGL (or happens extremely rarely). Issue also doesn’t happen if I use XFCE instead of KDE.
I am running a AMD A8 3870K with Radeon HD 7750. The issue happens with both radeon and amdgpu drivers. I tried switching drivers as the issue seems to be caused when the KDE compositor is enabled.
Considering GPU compositing is affecting usb sound cards, is it something to do with interrupt processing and my cpu being too slow ? Or high GPU usage causing some sort of electrical noise on my usb ports (Issue happens independent of which USB port I plug the dac into. I tried with all of them.)
While waiting on this thread for you to post the output of
inxi -aFJz
and to answer Svyatko’s remaining questions, you could as a very speculative test try this boot code in the grub boot menu:
intel_idle.max_cstate=1
Let us know if you need guidance on how to apply that as a temporary grub boot setting. If you succeed to boot with that, then see if you still have the same USB sound behaviour. Note this is a speculative test and it may not work nor even if it does help it may not be an appropriate long term solution. My understanding is this “max_cstate=1” will disable most of the power saving the CPU can do and that can have unpleasant consequences, especially for laptops.
Also I tried with setting cpufreq governor to performance before (from ondemand) and it didn’t help.
Regarding the 2 video adapters, 1 of them is part of my APU and I don’t use it as it doesn’t support 4K and I have a 4K monitor. I only use my 7750.
Let me also try with intel_idle.max_cstate and check the bios when I reboot later today after work. Currently I am connected to my work computer from this machine
I restarted my PC with max_cstate=1 and atleast till now (10 minutes after reboot) I have only had audio cut out 2 or 3 times and I can’t reproduce the issue like before by playing around with switching tabs or scrolling in firefox.
After using it for a bit more time, I do see audio cutting out occasionally but it’s much less frequent compared to before and unlike before I can’t reliably reproduce the issue by doing certain things.
Actually doesn’t seem to have solved it. It’s getting more frequent and worse over time. Started hearing more frequent drop outs now. So setting max_cstate doesn’t seem to work. Disabling compositing or switching to XRender actually worked better. I had my computer on for more than a couple of days and only rarely had the issue.
Checking with a different GNU/Linux distribution live CD can (IMHO) often be useful.
One thing you could do is write a bug report on the openSUSE-15.3 kernel related to your hardware.
Sometimes, if this is an issue whose solution is evading the support, then the quickest way to get the fix, is to write a bug report yourself on the openSUSE kernel in LEAP-15.3. That will get the immediate attention of the SuSE-GmBH packager for sound in the kernel, who is also an alsa sound driver developer. He may wish to work with you, giving you some tests to try to get the sound working. We are very fortunate in the openSUSE distro to have him as a packager.
I believe you can use your openSUSE forum user name and password when logging on to the bugzilla site.
Don’t bother referencing this thread, as the openSUSE packager will not read a forum thread, so your bug report needs to have all the salient information. Run the diagnostic script
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh --no-upload
and attach the resultant text file (that will be saved in /tmp) to your bug report.
As long as the openSUSE packager is not on vacation or working on some urgent task, you could get a reasonably quick response.
Try to disable GPU in APU - it is HD 6550D (Terascale 2), compared to discrete GCN1.
Possibly FF is trying to use it with bad results.
And you’re using