Comment 12 for bug 479375

@Daniel: Thanks for the tips. Actually I have turned off pulse autospawning before doing any tests for this bug report, and verified that pulseaudio is not in the process list after killing it. (I had read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log before) ;)

Also to make sure there is no confusion about the backend selection, I switched vlc and exaile to use the alsa sink by manual selection, additionally. So I guess it's safe to say that the problem is actually not in pulseaudio. (All my observations I post here will be with pulseaudio off, just to make clear.)

I did some testing with latencytop, but for my perception there is nothing peculiar in the results. The system is mostly waiting for the CPU. I guess that's normal? In the attachment is a pretty exemplary plot from latencytop, perhaps the more experienced eyes amongst us can pick something up from there. Does alsa have a separate process that I could have a special look at? I tried monitoring [hd-audio0], but that one barely said anything in latencytop. Otherwise, would that point to the fact that this would not be a scheduling issue? (Hence the mouse cursor stuttering I experience being unrelated.)

Just to clarify, my sound problems are not the kind of echo/stutter that some ICH9 users have experienced as described e.g. in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/274424. Mine are plain old irregular dropouts, as if a buffer setting was too low. Would you find an example recording useful for anything?

Speaking of buffer values, I tried finding out if there is any alsa buffer value that I could test around with, but without success. Is there such a thing?
Looking at the hda-intel diver side of things, I skipped through the codec documentation you hinted me to, David. At the current state though I don't know how to relate most of the stuff there to my problem. Of course the model detection might be wrong (even though all the alsa mixer mapping stuff seems to be correct). I could boot into my Ubuntu Studio 9.04 installation where the hda card does work flawlessly with alsa and compare lshw/dmesg outputs...?

On the hda-intel note, I read the alsa hda-intel troubleshooting notes, but none of the stuff really gave me an idea. I installed and ran the hda-analyzer python GUI tool to check the codec's internals, but I would need some pointers what to look for/try out in there.

Thanks a lot for your efforts, Alex