In getting ready for the first revision of A/V Linux I noticed this bug in ffado and firewire in general that may be an issue for Debian Etch and Ubuntu Gutsy users.
FFADO will install just fine from it’s repo however it will not necessarily fix a dependency for libraw1394 (and dev) properly. FFADO and JACK 0.116.1 will require libraw1394 greater than 1.3.0 or else the firewire drivers will not load because they are looking for a “read_cycle_timer” variable that doesn’t exist prior to 1.3. JACK will run fine with other hardware but not Firewire. This can be fixed by upgrading libraw1394 either by compiling or in my case a Debian Lenny 1.3 package fit the bill.
I’ve seen a few posts re: firewire of late and thought this might help.
It is already fixed in A/V Linux 1.0r1 to be released this week.
thanks for the heads-up. I’ve been using the freebob driver that came with ubuntu, but I was thinking of trying FFADO in order to get my latency down a bit more.
Do you also know anything about Freebob consuming around 25% cpu time being idle? This is in RT mode. Compared with my internal HDA Intel soundchip, which uses around 5% for the driver, this is not acceptable, while this is not in RT mode. (It gives Xruns in RT mode)
The Firewire audio interface I’m talking about is the Presonus Firepod.
How is this possible? Can I tweak this?
Sorry I can’t answer your question, I don’t use firewire myself (A Mackie Onyx would be nice to play with though!) just something I noticed preparing the system for others.
That being said…FFADO has picked up where FreeBob left off, perhaps it is worth looking into to troubleshoot your high CPU usage issues.