Current FFADO Status
This topic has 3 voices, contains 8 replies, and was last updated by 
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| November 17, 2011 at 22:55 #1363 | |
 SomeRandomGuy |
Greetings! I have been an Ubuntu Studio user for the past year or so, and I had been using an Alesis Multimix Firewire interface with ffado as recently as Ubuntu 11.10 and had a decently working setup. I have recently switched to Arch
I installed jack2 (1.9.7) from the official repositories (before I knew about archaudio’s repos) and libffado (2.0.1) also from the official repo. I have already added my user to the audio group, given the audio group realtime permissions, and added a udev rule to give the audio group access permissions to all firewire devices supported by ffado. However, when I run jack or ffado-dbus-service I get lots of errors when ffado tries to connect to my device. Does libffado 2.0.1 fully support the new firewire driver stack yet? If not, what is the best direction to pursue from here? Thank you for your time! |
| November 25, 2011 at 07:04 #1368 | |
 smoge |
libffado does support the new firewire stack. The old one does not even exist anymore in the kernel. Some devices are only support by the -svn version, you can build it from AUR or [archaudio-experimental] |
| December 7, 2011 at 18:53 #1380 | |
 schivmeister |
JACK and FFADO have both just been updated to fully automate much of the configuration. You no longer need to edit realtime settings or device permissions. Please test them. If your device does not appear to work, get the -svn version of ffado from AUR. |
| December 8, 2011 at 21:40 #1384 | |
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SomeRandomGuy |
Thank you all so much for your responses! I actually did build libffado from svn a few weeks ago using the pkgbuild script from experimental and it added support for my Alesis Multimix I am very excited to hear that JACK and FFADO have been updated, and I will probably start testing the new packages immediately. My one questions is where the new FFADO package is located. The Arch Extras repo still has libffado 2.0.1-5 as the newest package. I assume the new ones are in ArchAudio’s repositories? I have long looked forward to being able to migrate my audio work from windows and mac to Linux full time. It is guys like you that make that fesable and I really appreciate that! Thanks! |
| December 9, 2011 at 10:53 #1390 | |
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schivmeister |
You’re very welcome. As far as “updated” packages are concerned, you are updated. The latest buildscripts of libffado-svn in AUR has the relevant changes that were made in 2.0.1-5. You probably misunderstood “update” as in “new upstream release”, but that’s not the case. Continue to use libffado-svn, because that’s the only one which has support for your device. As far as performance is concerned, the only variables involved here are the jack settings and some kernel or I/O related configuration, especially those dealing with the hardware, like IRQs for instance. Take a look around the net for distro-independent advice on such performance issues. Most of them will be related to finding a good jack setting for your hardware, coupled with some kernel bootup options like ‘threadirqs’ (you should also get and run rtirq). |
| December 9, 2011 at 11:08 #1395 | |
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SomeRandomGuy |
Thanks for your suggestions on the xruns! Do I have to have the RT patched kernel to use threadirqs and rtirq or has this feature been pushed mainstream? I suspect that my issues are either comming from that, or from having a poor firewire card in my PC. I have a TI based one laying around somewhere that I might stick in if I can find it |
| December 10, 2011 at 19:04 #1399 | |
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schivmeister |
I’m not really sure about that one, whether it requires RT kernel. But yeah, in general, you might wanna give the RT kernel a spin. |
| February 20, 2012 at 04:40 #1443 | |
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SomeRandomGuy |
One final update to this old post just in case someone else is having the same problems with xruns on a fringe device (like the Multimix). After trying a number of things that did not seem to make any difference, I finally had a thought from long ago come back. Namely, I was using the built in firewire port on my motherboard, and I remembered someone mentioning long ago that the TI based firewire chipset was the closest to meeting the spec out of the ones you commonly ran into. I also remembered that the VIA based chipsets had issues in the past. I looked and it turned out that my built-in chipset was VIA based. I pulled out an older PCI firewire expansion card that I knew was TI based and disabled the onboard one. Instantly no xruns. |
| February 22, 2012 at 16:53 #1454 | |
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schivmeister |
Looks like it’s not just rumour! |
and I am in the process of setting up my system for firewire audio.You must be logged in to reply to this topic.