Re: [linux-audio-dev] an open letter to Linus re: low latency

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] an open letter to Linus re: low latency
From: David Olofson (david_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Sun Jun 25 2000 - 19:30:49 EEST


And while I'm around for once, here's my signature, unless I'm too
late.

Generally speaking, I can see the danger in accepting a "cludge":
Companies do this all the time, due to lack of time and development
resources, and they have to pay for it later, when the code is no
longer possible to maintain in any practical way. However, this
applies mostly to system design and interfaces, which affect lots of
code to a great extent, and AFAIK, this is not the nature of the
lowlatency patch. The patch is small, and from what I've seen of it,
it shouldn't bee too hard to make sure it's "visible" in the code, so
that it doesn't leave "What is this for?" traces in the code.

Reliable real time scheduling is absolutely essential for industrial
control systems and some kinds of multimedia applications, and
improves the quality of games and most kinds of multimedia. Since
multimedia and in particular, games, is what most desktop systems are
used for these days, it's strategically important to provide
competitive performance in this area.

The lowlatency patch offers *superior* performance without system
stability trade-offs (like moving application code into the kernel as
is done on other platforms) or new APIs for developers to learn,
which I think is a killer argument for using Linux instead of other
systems. The latter two facts should make Linux even more attractive
to the developers that are already considering developing multimedia
applications for Linux.

//David

.- M u C o S --------------------------------. .- David Olofson ------.
| A Free/Open Multimedia | | Audio Hacker |
| Plugin and Integration Standard | | Linux Advocate |
`------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/mucos -' | Open Source Advocate |
.- A u d i a l i t y ------------------------. | Singer |
| Rock Solid Low Latency Signal Processing | | Songwriter |
`---> http://www.angelfire.com/or/audiality -' `-> david_AT_linuxdj.com -'


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