Thanks @david.sidrane.
The Intel 8 series chipset/USB host controller had a rocky launch, but I’m pretty sure it’s been stable on Linux for the last several years worth of kernels.
Right now we’re running Ubuntu 16 on a 7 series intel host controller and Ubuntu 19 on a 100 series intel host controller. I’ve just tested both with Logic Pro 16 and the alpha software. It’s clear we have a lot of work to do on the Alpha software when recording at the performance limit of the device, 500 MSPS on 6 digital channels. After about 10 seconds, the software is trying to free up memory by discarding processed data but it isn’t able to process the data in real time. Trying to close a tab with a lot of data has a chance of breaking the app. We’ll get working on that soon. We do most of our development and testing on higher performance machines; we do mostly UI/interface testing on these lower performance machines. We’re planning on setting up automated benchmark testing for the back-end on a slower machine, so we can improve the situation, and make sure we don’t accidentally step backwards.
What capture settings are you using? Does it capture reliably even at very low sample rates?
In other news, we found the problem with Windows 7 (and presumably 2008). Turns out a few months ago we introduced an API for debugging purposes that was only available in a specific update to windows 10. Removing it fixed the problem.
The next alpha release candidate was already created on Friday, but it has bugs. there is a 50/50 the windows 7 fix will land in alpha 15, and if not, it should be in alpha 16.
One final note on USB stability in the alpha software. The USB layer is the only piece of the 1.X software that still remains in the 2.X alpha codebase. It’s going to be a big project to overhaul, and we haven’t started working on it - but it is planned. What we are trying to do now is capture more detailed analytics from customers who’ve opted in so we can figure out what percentage of customers are affected and how bad the stability problems are for those users. From what we know so far, a very small percentage of users are having a pretty terrible experience with the product. Unfortunately, it’s a pain to reproduce. We’ve already bought several computers identical to the machines our customers have reported the problems with, and still haven’t been able to reliably reproduce them here. I also have a box full of “USB exercisers” next to me which I’m looking forward to integrating into some end-to-end reliability testing for our hardware and software.