Author Topic: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?  (Read 18415 times)

Andi B.

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #15 on: June 01, 2019, 02:04:09 pm »
Quote
I beg to differ. The  32 bit test versions are noticeably faster (with USB 2),
What is noticeably faster? If you read what I wrote at the testers list you'll see there is nearly no speed difference when reading/writing to external disks. Different version of usbmsd make more difference than the 16/32 stacks. At least that's the result of my tests.

Maybe that changes with USB3. And maybe it's a good thing in the long term. But until your post above I didn't see anyone claiming there's a speed improvement for regular use cases.

Lars

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #16 on: June 01, 2019, 07:39:57 pm »
I beg to doubt that Doug's judgement is based on any measurable or even measured facts.
This is how the USB HW works: you prepare a transfer by setting up transfer desriptors that point to the data to transmit. Then you kick off the HW which does the transfer completely autonomously, without any SW intervention.
The only thing left is to handle the HW interrupt that is asserted when the transfer is completed (passing the transfer descriptor back to the system, setting up the next transfer etc.).
This basic mechanism is about the same with USB 3 where USB 3 does have additional means to speed up things because I seem to remember it allows to define concurrent transfers (multiple transfers running partly in parallel). Again, it is the HW that does all the transfer, the SW part is negilible.
I don't see how changing SW from 16-bit to 32-bit can make that much of an impact but I am an engineer and not a believer.

USBMSD on the other hand is crippled by the fact that larger blocks of data (like one or multiple disk sectors) typically occupy more than one memory page (a list of "scattered" data). And then it would be helpful if the host controller drivers would allow to pass this scatter list directly to the HC drivers as the transfer descriptor mechanism allows to do just that: set up a list of discontiguous memory blocks to transfer. But this is not currently supported and therefore my workaround was to copy those scattered blocks to a contiguous piece of memory and transfer that in one shot. This DOES show performance improvement because people have already measured the performance gain.

« Last Edit: June 01, 2019, 07:47:19 pm by Lars »

ivan

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #17 on: June 01, 2019, 08:08:02 pm »
Hi Lars,

A bit off topic but are you thinking of producing a USB 3 driver sometime?

Lars

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #18 on: June 01, 2019, 10:06:56 pm »
No.
No time, no HW, no interest. And for the next 2 years (likely starting end of this year) I will be somewhere else. Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.

ivan

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #19 on: June 02, 2019, 01:14:35 am »
Thanks Lars and I hope you have a good time on your new venture, also thanks for all your help.

David Graser

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #20 on: June 02, 2019, 02:09:05 am »
Thanks Lars and I hope you have a good time on your new venture, also thanks for all your help.
Best wishes on all future endeavors Lars.

Fahrvenugen

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #21 on: June 02, 2019, 05:27:04 am »
Lars,

I do want to thank you for all your work on OS/2 over the years.  I've got a bunch of cheap USB-Audio adapters that I picked up for around $1 each, based on the CM108 chipset.  I was happy to find that it works well with your USB driver.

My only complaint about it is that its record channel is only mono, but that's a limitation of the hardware and has nothing to do with your driver.  I actually found that - when recording from it in mono I got better results then when I tried similar tests under Windows (which gives the occasional choppiness).  Playback to the USB dongle works well, overall I'm very impressed.

Best!
« Last Edit: June 02, 2019, 05:29:31 am by Fahrvenugen »

OS4User

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #22 on: June 02, 2019, 09:36:42 pm »
Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.

Hi Lars,
Thank you for your efforts! I really hope that you will stay with OS/2 no matter what.

rbri

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Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
« Reply #23 on: June 03, 2019, 07:42:32 pm »
No time, no HW, no interest. And for the next 2 years (likely starting end of this year) I will be somewhere else. Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.

Hi Lars, many, many thanks for all the hard work during the last years. Enjoy whatever you plan.