I just installed Fedora and joined the forum. I have been a Linux user for 18 years and today I decided to switch from Manjaro to Fedora. Everything is going great so far, except for one thing.
When my laptop is in performance mode, all audio starts crackling. When it’s set to balanced mode, the audio works fine. The same thing happened to me with Manjaro after Kernel 5.4, so I was stuck with an old kernel.
Any idea regarding how to resolve this?
Thank you in advance!
Is there a reason you absolutely need to use performance mode? Does balanced mode not meet your needs?
My laptop (now 6 years old) does not even support performance mode and does everything I need it to do very well.
I don’t deny the wish for things to work the absolute best possible, but sometimes a compromise must be made. Unless this is a critical issue accept the compromise while working with developers (kernel?, audio?, driver?) to identify and fix the problem.
The title and your post do not identify anything you may have done to try and find out the cause but only reveal the conditions where it occurs.
It may be hard to identify problems and what information is relevant to eliminate irrelevant cause.
Option 1. RTC/HPET settings
Using the latest kernel on performance mode, you could try one of optimization settings for real-time clock and interrupt frequency of High Precision Event Timer Driver (HPET).
Set the value to the max 2048 on both files on root.
Edited: Changing these files only lasts on the current runtime and do not persist on the reboot.
Option 2. Change sample rate on the fly to see if that works
Default value in PipeWire is 48hz. Change it to 44.1hz.
p.s.) Above optimization settings are not hard rules or solutions. Displayed as one of troubleshooting steps when we can’t narrow down the possible causes of crackling.
I wanted to make clear, those two echo commands shown on the wiki URL in your “option 1” only last for the duration of that bootup. After the system is rebooted those echoed values are gone. So you’d need to roll some kind of home made systemd service to poke those in for every boot, or have rc-local service do it
Thank you everybody for chiming in. I am sorry it took a while for me to get back to this discussion, I was on vacation and I was experimenting with resolving this myself and I seem to have found a solution.
After about 2 years of struggling with this on and off and about 4-5 posts on public forums and troubleshooting along with many people more knowledgeable than me, what has worked for me is this:
I uninstalled TLP and power-profiles-daemon and replaced them with TuneD. I read it’s becoming the default in Fedora 41, so I thought it’s worth a shot and it works!
I am now on the latest Fedora kernel (6.10) with my processor adjusting anywhere from 800mhz to 4.6Ghz automatically depending on what’s needed and there is no sound crackling/popping at all!