[gentoo-user] Optimum sound settings for QEMU VM?

I'm involved in beta testing Gstreamer 1.x support for HTML5 under
Pale Moon (a Firefox fork).  So far so good; it works.  I use a QEMU VM
for some building and testing.  Things work great on a real physical
machine, but audio absolutely sucks in the QEMU VM.  I get an annoying
warble-stutter and the playback seems a bit slower than it should be.
The same thing also happens with mplayer playing a .wav file, so it's
definitely not a Pale Moon browser problem.

  The VM gets 3 gigs of RAM (host has 8), 4 gigs of swap space, and 3 of
the host's 4 cores.  Resources should not be a problem.  Has anybody got
better performance?  If so, what are your kernel and sound card settings?

  I launch QEMU with "-soundhw hda".  Here are the "make menuconfig"
kernel config sound driver settings for the Gentoo guest VM.

    Device Drivers  --->


<*> Sound Card Support  --->


<*>   Advanced Linux Sound Architecture  --->


[*] PCI sound devices  --->
    HD-Audio  --->


<*> HD Audio PCI
(64) Pre-allocated buffer size for HD-audio driver
[*] Build hwdep interface for HD-audio driver
<*> Build Realtek HD-audio codec support
<*> Build Analog Device HD-audio codec support

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications