Question S0 Sleep State causes bluetooth audio stutter ?

[Ralston18]

Any differences if Chrome is disabled or stopped?

 

[magrega]

Any differences if Chrome is disabled or stopped?

Yes. Then all of the lines say None. Chrome is playing video and I guess that there is supposed to be a bluetooth driver that plays audio. But there's none.

 

[Ralston18]

Something buggy running - runs but does not really provide audio signal for some reason.

Use Get-Process to look for any processes that come and go with Chrome running or not running.

Check through ProcessName.

 

[Ralston18]

Also this Get may help.

Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object {$_.Class -eq "Bluetooth"}

 

[magrega]

Also this Get may help.

Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object {$_.Class -eq "Bluetooth"}

Will try. A friend came by with a jbl go 4 speaker which supposedly supports low energy bluetooth. The same behivor with lags.

I guess at this point everything bluetooth related isn't relevant.

 

[magrega]

Something buggy running - runs but does not really provide audio signal for some reason.

feels like there's something with the driver that is either related to streaming audio or somehow related to power which doesn't do what it is supposed to.

powercfg -requests supposed to show my bluetooth device driver and say that there is an audio stream going on

 

[Ralston18]

Send a screenshot of the powercfg -requests results if you can.

Or copy paste the results.

Just ensure that it does not include any personally identifying information.

If there is an audio stream there should be a way to learn more about it.

Edit to include "lost line".

I am thinking about PID (Process ID).

 

[magrega]

Spoiler: Right after Windows Boot, blueteooth speaker connected

After OS boot Legacy Kernel Caller and Power Manager lines go away after some time while using the laptop.

Spoiler: Bluetooth speaker connected, no audio playback, chrome closed

Spoiler: bt connected, chrome maximized, music is playing

Spoiler: bt connected, chrome minimized, music is playing

Spoiler: bt connected, chrome minimzed, music paused

 

[Ralston18]

Nicely done.

Noted:

"After OS boot Legacy Kernel Caller and Power Manager lines go away after some time while using the laptop."

What is that time?

And, of course, I became interested in "Legacy Kernal Caller".

Found the following link:

https://superuser.com/questions/370429/legacy-kernel-caller-preventing-sleep-mode

Not sure, full disclosure, about some specific relevancy of the link.

Yet "-requestoverride" and some of the following comments seem to fit in a bit as well.

Overall though, the link, and other similar links, may help add some insight about what is happening.

You are much more likely to spot something....

Fixing the cause (buggy code/driver?) may not be viable but at least knowing what is happening is a plus...

 

[magrega]

Found the following link:

Yeah, been there. Did that. Requestoverride didn't do anything that I noticed.
I think legaacy kernel caller is a substitute for some drivers that are either deprecated or just not installed correctly.

I also ran LatencyMon to see what causes DPC latency to be high and noted that there are two drivers that have the highest dpc counts: ntoskrnl.exe and Wdf01000.sys.

ntoskrnl.exe - i think this is the legacy kernel caller thing.

 

[magrega]

I guess running Windows Performance Recorder + Windows Performance Analyzer is an option now to go deeper to see what causes DPC to run high. Pretty sure it will be something amd related

 

[magrega]

Been playing around with Windows Performance Recorder + Windows Performance Analyzer. As far as I could decipher numerous reports I've made across the day I can half-confidently say that the audio lags are occuring during some background work that windows does while in screen off state.

I've noticed that there are spikes in activity during standby which cause audio lags. The proccesses that spike are different. It was mpmseng.exe, system<controlpanel> something something.exe, chrome itself, svchost.exe and some others. I went as far as deleted the whole microsoft defender just to check if it would change anything. But it confirmed that there are random exe files at work.

Also the spikes in activity correlate with disk usage spikes so I went ahead and made swap file larger but it didn't help.

Pretty possible that I read the wpa report wrong and made some wrong assumptions. Will report back.

 

[magrega]

Guys, I think I did it.

Spoiler: memes to celebrate

An AMD Display driver caused DPC count of ntoskrnl.exe to go high, throttling cpu. I found this post on reddit and went to the second solution.

What I did was:
1. Downloaded and extracted PowerSettingsExplorer.zip contents
2. Launched PowerSettingsExplorer.exe as admin
3. Found 2 options: Processor Idle Demote Threshold and Processor Idle Promote Threshold
4. Unticked them
5. Went to power plan settings, found new options under "Processor Power Management" and set both to 100%

I understand that this is probably more of a workaround than a solution. I don't really know what these two options do but I think always running them at 100% without letting the system control them would lead to a faster CPU wear but at least this solution allows for experience I was hoping to achieve (which is a basic user laptop experience, jesus christ).

AMD need to do something with their messed up drivers so regular users won't have to spend years troubleshooting it themselves. They didn't even reply to any of my bugreports.

 

[SteJBorchard]

Nice job! My only other suggestion would of been nuke it from orbit and then install the drivers one by one once its ready and see which one starts triggering the issue.

Of course this would take a very long time and may not replicate the situation as given all the factors it may only occur with everything fully setup the way you use it on a average work day,

 

[Ralston18]

Indeed.

Down in the proverbial weeds for certain...

 

[magrega]

Indeed.

Down in the proverbial weeds for certain...

Thanks for sticking around, really helped me move forward with it.

Nice job! My only other suggestion would of been nuke it from orbit and then install the drivers one by one once its ready and see which one starts triggering the issue.

Of course this would take a very long time and may not replicate the situation as given all the factors it may only occur with everything fully setup the way you use it on a average work day,

I had that idea too. I tried extracting the driver files from AMD GPU driver installer and installing them in Device Manager but it didn't do anything. And another I idea I had is to try to install them one by one but then I got sucked into WPA and everything unfolded in a very unexpected but succeful manner.

 

[SteJBorchard]

Of course for me anytime I have an issue like this I do in fact Nuke it From Orbit and install everything one by one.

Os install > Security programs and Hardening > Driver's from offline files/physical media > windows up/OS Updates > observe windows/OS behavior for awhile before reinstalling all of your Programs and data.

hasn't failed me yet. YET.