I try to use my Focusrite Saffire PRO 24
firewire audio interface with Kubuntu 18.10
on my Dell LATITUDE E6510
Laptop.
if i plug it in in a clean system it gets detected and i can have my system sounds (firefox media or other media players) coming out from it. yeah! ;-)
but after some time - seconds up to minutes - seems random - the connection crashes:
dmesg
...
[ 2273.445706] firewire_ohci 0000:04:00.4: DMA context IT0 has stopped, error code: evt_timeout
[ 2273.445722] firewire_ohci 0000:04:00.4: DMA context IR0 has stopped, error code: evt_descriptor_read
i have searched up and down the net a little -
one recommendation is to use a special driver the ffado project
and jack.
i have setup jack with pulseaudio as in this answer. That is working fine with the default system audio out.
i also have installed ffado-mixer via apt. the FFADO Mixer Application is working nicely and i can configure my card as needed (internal routing and levels..)
but i can't get jack configured to use the alternative firewire driver (ffado) -
after some more research and experiments i found that newer kernels include snd_dice
- a build in driver for the dice
based cards that work together with alsa.
so now i know why it works 'out of the box' - that is cool!
but as i written above - this has stability issues in my setup. (most likely the used firewire chip in my laptop - a Ricoh Co Ltd - R5C832 PCIe IEEE 1394 Controller
plays a crucial rule in this.. as fare as all the info i found TI chipsets should work much better)
so my goal is to go on with testing the alternative ffado driver:
for this i have blacklisted snd_dice
:
stefan@stefan-Latitude-E6510:~$ sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire-local.conf
stefan@stefan-Latitude-E6510:~$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire-local.conf
stefan@stefan-Latitude-E6510:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire-local.conf
blacklist snd_dice
stefan@stefan-Latitude-E6510:~$
then restarted the system..
now if i check with lsmod | grep snd_dice
i don't see snd_dice - so the blacklisting seems to work.
a quick test with ffado-mixer
is working correctly.
also the ffado-test ListDevices
command finds the card:
$ ffado-test ListDevices
Cannot create RT messagebuffer thread: Operation not permitted (1)
Retrying messagebuffer thread without RT scheduling
Messagebuffer not realtime; consider enabling RT scheduling for user
-----------------------------------------------
FFADO test and diagnostic utility
Part of the FFADO project -- www.ffado.org
Version: 2.4.1
(C) 2008, Daniel Wagner, Pieter Palmers
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
-----------------------------------------------
=== 1394 PORT 0 ===
Node id GUID VendorId ModelId Vendor - Model
0 0x00130e0401c031e3 0x0000130E 0x00000007 Focusrite - SAFFIRE_PRO_24
no message buffer overruns
but the problem persists: i can't get jack to see the card:
have i missed something here?
i thought that the card should pop up in this list - especially if i have blacklisted the other driver..
I hope some of you have a idea / tips how to go on from here :-)
jackd -d firewire ...
works just fine.