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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: qjackctl setup dialog - missing device

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 :-)

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  • Did you ever figure it out? Nov 1, 2021 at 17:47
  • sadly not. and with my new laptop i have no easy accessible firewire interface anymore :-( Nov 2, 2021 at 8:33
  • I never managed to get qjackctl working but running jackd -d firewire ... works just fine. Dec 3, 2021 at 22:32
  • 1
    Oh, and I'm using the USB-C port on my new laptop and it works without any problems :) Dec 4, 2021 at 23:34

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