Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: costs of IPC
From: Sébastien Métrot (meeloo_AT_noos.fr)
Date: Thu May 17 2001 - 03:00:33 EEST
Hi, I just got an idea that you may think is completely stupid and as a LAD
newbie I hope you will forgive all the possibly silly things I will say
here:
What about a virtual ALSA driver handling all this?
You can built a multiclient adio driver whose only purpose is to expose N
stereo / mono IO busses to the application. You can then sync all the
applications, to the sample (because you will call the callback function
when the hardware will be ready), you can even provide a mixer interface to
the driver to be able to reroute any bus to any app in realtime. You can
even do this with midi. You than get the best of both worlds: its up to the
application developper to decide if he wants to use threads, many processes
or only one. You can be sure to have the lowest latency because you work at
the lowest system level and you can even propose to have some kind of
offline rendering abilities. At the same time you will provide exactely the
same API for all apps and even better: any audio app using ALSA can be
directly compatible with the system and rerouted to a bus: when your app
tries to record it gets its data from the bus it is connected to whose data
may comme from another plugin or a real audio card input depending on the
configuration chosen by the user, it then does its processing on the audio
data and spits out its result to the output device it opened, which is just
the output bus.
As I said I not really aware of the ALSA API or even linux audio programming
even if I have been following your really interesting discutions for 2 or 3
month now. Maybe this issue have allready been discussed, please forgive me
if it is the case...
Sebastien
(sorry for the double post Jay, I got messed up by the reply-to...)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu May 17 2001 - 03:23:52 EEST