malfunct

I've built this hackintosh box for audio production purposes, mainly.

I've been having audio stuttering/crackling problems on 10.7.2.

This happens in DAW's and audio players. At first I thought it was a bug in TC Electronic drivers but now I think it's something else.

I saw that sometimes right after login the audio programs work, but after some time the crackling begins.  I've noticed that stuttering tends to happen when there is a Page in/out activity in the memory system.

As you know, Lion has one of the stupidest virtual memory schemes in the world, and constantly swaps even when there are gigabytes of available memory.

I've noticed that this doesn't create much of a problem on my macbook pro. But on the hackintosh, it causes serious problems. Even when there is a slight swapping going on, the audio can stutter, crackle and pop like crazy.

I'm now testing my hypothesis, and I think there is a correlation. This happens severely using Live because my project uses a lot of memory, in which case my 6GB system goes above >3GB Active memory, and because of the 0.5GB of Wired and 1.7GB Inactive Memory the system prefers to keep, I can't use my DAW properly. Constant audio problems prevent me from working on any non-trivial project.

Some of the simpler projects I have on Logic work fine. It's when I load the large Ableton Live projects I see this problem. You probably won't see it on simple test projects, I could open a virus ti track and play it live. No problem. When I open a large project, audio starts to crackle and virus goes out of sync. I can't edit anything.

Any suggestions? Can my claim be true? If that's true, this should be a serious problem for many audio pros using Hackintosh. I suspect that this might be due to an unfortunate interaction between the Hackintosh SATA drivers and the kernel. Or maybe disk drives aren't fast enough, you need SSD. Somehow, the kernel seems to suffer latency processing the page faults and loses realtime ability.

What can I do to make CoreAudio regain its real-time behavior? Is the only solution to downgrade to Snow Leopard? Could it be some other reason? How can I find out?

Suggestions most welcome. Please help!

malfunct

PS: The CPU is not maxed out in any project, Live shows about 50% CPU load. The stuttering does happen when I play the test tone in Live. It's interesting how more snappy my other Snow Leopard installation that I use as a rescue system feels. :/

This is supposedly an old bug, but persists with Chameleon 2.1 / Chimera 11.x .

I have a 2 TB Time Machine volume. It's started to fill up, I've also added movies, etc. I think about 1.4 GB is used. The bootloader is stuck on boot, with the progress indicator slowing down and stopping. It's written elsewhere that this is due to the file system search function getting stuck on large volumes with overflow extents *sigh*. Anyhow, this bug currently prevents using large volumes. I have found no way to cleanly boot my Hackintosh otherwise, so I had to disable the volume.

Any suggestions on how to fix this situation is welcome.

Here is a thread about this old bug: http://forum.voodoop...opic,901.0.html

When I erase the MBR of the offending drive, I get Chimera to work beautifully. But I haven't found any way to bring the volume back and still get Chimera to run. One would think that Chimera wouldn't try to look into unbootable partitions, but it seems to... At any rate, this would still create a problem with bootable large partitions, so it ought to be important. Anyone else have the same problem?

I had a perfectly working installation on 10.7.2, OpenCL/GL was enabled, and I never got a crash with that config. I'm using the MacPro5,1 profile.

I upgraded to 10.7.5, with a lot of problems. Now whenever I use a GL heavy app like VLC, the system crashes. I get artifacts, etc., as well from time to time. System doesn't survive more than 15 minutes. I believe there is nothing wrong with my hardware (if somehow the new drivers didn't kill my card), because it seems to work properly on another leopard installation.

Did anyone have a similar situation with 4xx cards?

I tried installing NVIDIA web drivers, it didn't help, I'm trying again as I write this.

Thanks in advance,