Michael Brown reports,
"I figured it might be down to IRQ activity. It turned out to be xosview, which is a program to monitor system
parameters, including IRQ. killall -STOP xosview makes the noise reduce."
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Any program which parses /proc can cause this, including ps and top. This is because current kernels do a great deal of blocking while handling the /proc filesystem. If you have a card which has tiny hardware FIFOs? and requires constant low-latency access to the bus, the blocking by the kernel can cause problems.
Buying a better sound card with better hardware, or avoiding /proc access will help.
-Dan (goemon at anime dot net)
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