[Wizard] Audio drivers

[Craig Ringer]

>  i can't use M$ products because i have to buy them to avoid software
> piracy issues and that defeats the purpose of this box. But i  am also
> setting up for use as a portable gateway/router and proxy/dns/dhcp
> server so i would have to dual boot it anyway.

Hmm... while I can't really see why DOS would handle it and Linux not, 
FreeDOS might well run the MP3 player etc that Mike mentions - for a 
really quick boot, etc.

> I figured it was CPU since i am not using swap at all. Anything on the
> screen at all and it skips. MP3Blaster likes to put stuff on the screen
> while the rest doesn't.

I've had MPlayer playing low-res VIDEO on the box. It sometimes skips a 
little, but it does work, and that's MPEG4 so it's not what one would 
call light on the CPU. Alas, even running in accelerated mode (`nsc` 
driver) the poor thing doesn't even seem up to the CPU load of 
displaying a DVD when decoding is done on another machine. I'm having to 
use '-vo x11' in  mplayer because the Xv support is so totally crap 
(severely pixellated, slower than native x11), but it's still the CPU 
not the network interface that's failing to cope. Whether it's network 
overhead, X11 protocol handling, or the actual video display I can't say 
for sure, but it doesn't like it. Oh well.

My point about the video: it most certainly should be able to handle 
MP3s. Try increasing the buffer length in the player, make /sure/ you've 
enabled DMA, 32bit I/O, unmasked IRQs, and enabled multi-block reads on 
the HDD (
	hdparm -c 1 -u 1 -m 16 -d 1 /dev/hda
), and if you need to try a preemptable kernel. A P100 can play 4 mp3 
streams at the same time, so this thing sure should be able to handle one!
OTOH, the FPU in the Geode is apparently garbage. It might even be worth 
disabling the FPU and letting linux emulate it in software, as an 
experiment - or perhaps using an integer MP3 decoder.

By the way - when I increased the video memory on my wizard to 4MB, it 
stopped crashing when using RENDER/Xft2 - so it now makes quite a 
reasonable, zippy thin client :-)

XF86Config-4 available on request.

Craig Ringer