From: Clemens Ladisch [mailto:clemens@ladisch.de]
I'd guess that some driver uses a busy loop for writing the codec registers.
Which drivers are you using for your sound hardware?
It's Intel HD Audio.
But the point is that three other processes light up when I move the slider. I think they're all monitoring the master volume changes, and not actually involved in doing the volume change. I would expect lots of CPU usage if I had alsamixer open at the time, because it monitors these changes, and updates its display. But the numbers I got from "top -H" were with no monitoring apps running that I know of.
What I'm wondering about these processes (pulseaudio, threaded-ml, indicator-sound) is two things:
* Is there any way to disable or uninstall them in Ubuntu?
* If I create my own minimal embedded distro (I'm trying to use the Yocto project for that), will they simply not be there, or will I have to go to some lengths there, too, to disable or uninstall them?
If this is just an issue with Ubuntu, then it's not worth spending much time on it, since this synth is targeted purely for an embedded environment.