Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] an open letter to Linus re: low latency
From: Stefan Westerfeld (stefan_AT_space.twc.de)
Date: Thu Jun 22 2000 - 22:31:57 EEST
Hi!
On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 08:24:07AM -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
> this is an excellent context description, maybe part of this or
> something similar (shorter) should be included in letter to Linus.
>
> from some interviews I've read it looks like Linus does not care about
> sound much and I think that it reflects negatively on linux as a whole,
> since it slows down the progress of all multimedia development on linux
> - music&sound, games, graphics etc. IMO the good multimedia foundation
> (both at the dirvers level and user-space libs) is more important to
> acceptance of linux as desktop than desktop environment/apps itself
> (gnome/kde etc.). more important in a sense that it should be developed
> first and desktop apps should build upon it rather than each develop its
> own foundation.
>
> example: why is it that enlightenment has to develop its own sound
> server? kinda strange part of window manager...
I think you can't blame anyone who is working on open source software (like
Linus does) for not being interested in your-favourite-feature. People are
developing the things they are good in and they are interested in. Everything
else (developing things you are not good in or not interested in) wouldn't
exactly help the software quality. ;)
So the *most important* thing which is required to have sound mixing support
or low latency or whatever in the kernel is somebody who really cares about
it, who likes working on it and who is good at it.
I personally tend to think that having too much sound stuff in the kernel
isn't a good idea either. We also do not run X11 in the kernel ;-). You have
some restrictions when writing kernel code, which you don't have when you're
able to solve the same thing in user land. Thats why I am working on aRts,
which can do the sound server thing esd does, too, but does a whole lot more
and may be just the solid multimedia foundation you ask for.
Whatever: if you (or somebody else) is unhappy with linux (or especially the
kernel) being not strong enough in the multimedia section, then doing some-
thing about it (and contributing real work, and working with the kernel
people to get it integrated) is probably the most efficient thing to do.
Cu... Stefan
--
-* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan_AT_space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-
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