Re: [linux-audio-dev] plugin format

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] plugin format
From: Benjamin GOLINVAUX (golinvaux_AT_benjamin.net)
Date: to elo    26 1999 - 19:06:15 EDT


>From what I understand from your posts regarding Audiality, it is
basically
an audio (& midi ?) stream engine running under RTLinux...

It seems like a _very_ interesting idea, but I have some questions :

1 disk performance

How does RTLinux interface with the filesystem ? Could you imagine to
let audiality access its own partition ( la ProTools) but, even then,
how do you predict the latency due to the hard disk ? Do the spec
include an AV hard disk (it could be the _only_ solution) ?

2 protected memory

The main question I have regarding this platform is : how do you debug
it ? I understand rtlinux code can screw the machine... Do you plan to
provide protected memory mechanism ?

One good thing would be to let people test and debug their plugins
using SCHED_FIFO... Provided enough similarities between the two
programming models...

3 drivers

Your driver abstraction layer seems very cool... It's just that there
is no high-quality audio card for Linux yet, am I wrong ?

I'm actually trying to develop a small dsp test bed using BeOS (I'm not
developing for Linux yet) and I think the MediaKit programming model is
very clean.

However, this is not hard-real time, which I agree is _indispensable_
for audio production (yes, indispensable).... But will the constraints
of RTLinux be viable for the developers ?

Another question : since BeOS claims to be the MediaOS (which I agree
being given their nice architecture), is Linux _as good as BeOS_
regarding audio _right now_ (I mean, even without audiality) ?

I read about the linux 5ms latency using a new kernel patch, which is
slightly more than Be engineers claim to have achieved using an Event
Layla...

Does it mean that, under some circumstances, one can process and audio
stream 'live' under Linux with 5ms latency WITHOUT GLITCHES ?

Does the non-preemptive kernel block the audio processing sometimes ?
Network ? disk ?

I'd be glad to know since my interest in BeOS in _only_ because of the
potential good LIVE daw perdormance...

Benjamin-


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