Subject: [linux-audio-dev] LAAGA - how are we doing ?
From: Jim Peters (jim_AT_aguazul.demon.co.uk)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 13:00:57 EEST
I'm wondering if now is the moment to take a step back and figure out
where we've got to with this and where we're heading. I've just been
throwing my ideas in without much plan, responding to ideas put
forward by Paul and Kai, and we seem to have got somewhere, but there
are a lot more areas to discuss. For instance:
- Plugin interface, how they are called, how they are setup,
restrictions on what they may do, calls that are available to them,
and so on.
- Server interface, how external processes can request that a plugin
be loaded or unloaded, how plugins are connected together or to
busses or however this will work. Bus and plugin management - are
they named or numbered or what ?
- Crash and restart-handling. This server (even once stable in
itself) is likely to crash a *lot* whilst new plugins are being
developed and debugged, and it would be good to bear this in mind
whilst designing the interfaces to external processes. Restarts
would be required if the sample rate was changed.
- Security. Given that we're presumably loading plugins for any
external app that asks us to, we need to have fairly low privileges.
How does this mesh with some of the high privileges we'll probably
need ? Do we need to somehow vet the external apps that are making
the requests ?
Anything else ? Please add to this list if you see some issue that
would need to be covered.
Even bearing in mind all the above, it would be good to keep this as
small and clean as we can - to have it doing the right thing by
default from a good design rather than having great wadges and layers
of code to get the desired features.
Another point - is it fairly clear that nothing exists quite like this
yet on Linux ? We're talking about an extreme low-latency plugin
server to allow efficient interoperation of several low-latency apps
[*]. (At least, this is my understanding of what Paul and Kai have
been talking about.)
What's the next step ? I would guess that you guys have a lot more
experience with this kind of project than I have.
Jim
P.S. Please correct me if anything I'm saying is nonsense or if I'm
heading in the wrong direction at all with this posting.
[* or higher-latency external apps that are willing to connect in via
ALSA or some other means - we can fix the delay between sending them
data and expecting it back to take account of this. ]
--
Jim Peters / __ | \ Aguazul
/ /| /| )| /| / )|| \
jim_AT_aguazul. \ (_|(_|(_|(_| )(_|I / www.aguazul.
demon.co.uk \ ._) _/ / demon.co.uk
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