Different hardware deals with an underrun in different ways-ideally it'd detect that there's no more data, and just go quiet ( that's usually what an ethernet card will do ); you'd really hope sound hardware would also just stop doing stuff, but some seem to just replay the ring buffer's contents over and over, until someone ( often the operating system ) closes them down.
32.
In computing, "'buffer underrun "'or "'buffer underflow "'is a state occurring when a processes is fed with data at a lower speed than the data is being read from it . ( The term is distinct from buffer overflow, a condition where a portion of memory being used as a buffer has a fixed size but is filled with more than that amount of data . ) This requires the program or device reading from the buffer to pause its processing while the buffer refills.
