I am dual-booting WinXP and Debian sid and have used WinXP more than Debian in the last weeks, so I am not sure this problem is new to sid, but I only noticed it after a dist-upgrade yesterday.
I was working on a webpage in quanta, listening to an ogg in kaffeine, when the sound began to stutter. Opening a konsole and starting top revealed modprobe, run by root with NI -10 at 95% cpu usage, was probably the culprit. I thought, what the heck, you just dist-upgraded, might be some post-install script. After some 30 seconds my desktop stopped behaving all sluggish (mouse wouldn't move correctly, sound stuttered, buttons had to be pressed for a second until they reacted).
Too bad this came back after 5 minutes or so (only time measurement I can provide is that it was during the next song on my playlist). And then some 5 minutes after that again... you get the point.
I do not know how it came to be that my system needs to probe for new hardware with this frequency, and I would really like to disable this as it is kinda annoying if I cannot listen to music while working
Anybody got any ideas where to look and how this might have been introduced to my system? First: I do not know how to setup cron jobs myself, never needed to, so an introduction to that might be in order, but I think something is broken if this got setup like this in the first place.
Running Debian/sid on a P4, Asus P4B533, using alsa with the ice1712 module on an M-Audio Delta Audiophile card, Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200 with binary drivers 61.11 from Nvidia. Having a HP deskjet 5550 (?) and some sane flatbed scanner (BenQ scan2web) connected via USB.
Thanks,
Thomas