Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] lowish-latency patch and toolchain
From: Jay Ts (jay_AT_toltec.metran.cx)
Date: Mon Jul 10 2000 - 08:47:17 EEST
Tom wrote:
> Simply saying that audio apps require an
> OS with sub 5 ms latency is incomplete and potentially misleading.
Well, I for one was hoping for less than 1 ms...
> I feel that pro quality audio on regular Linux is achievable, combined
> with some non-radical optimizations and common sense. I've been doing
> it for years on mac and windows. The way we accomplish this is by
> dedicating the box to audio, disabling all non-essensial background
> tasks,
(I can almost hear those "non-essential" background tasks already: "Stop Dave,
I can feel it. I can really feel it." :)
> and generally avoiding anything that might cause the OS to become
> too busy while we are actually recording.
That pretty much describes why I'd rather be using Linux than either Mac
or Windows. ;-) Really, I can't believe how many Mac users have told me
that it's ok for the system to crash, because they can just reboot! Apple
or Apple culture apparently has conditioned them to accept frequent rebooting
as the Apple Way of Life.
With good low-latency support, it will be possible to use Linux for audio
without having to pray, chant, or perform ritual sacrifice!
I'm very happy that on Linux there is support for soft realtime processes
(POSIX.1b). I can burn CD-Rs worry free while happily doing many other
things with the computer at the same time, because cdrecord runs as a real
time process. And I feel that's the way it should be - why should the user
have to go through any exceptional procedures to help the poor computer
work right? Adding support for low latency will extend Linux's capability
even further and make it a high-quality solution for even more applications.
The computer hardware we have nowadays is very capable; it's the job of
the operating system to make those capabilities available to the user.
- Jay Ts
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