Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] New powermacs?
From: John Lazzaro (lazzaro_AT_CS.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Sun Jun 22 2003 - 00:29:21 EEST
> "Ivica Bukvic" <ico_AT_fuse.net> writes:
>
> Anyone care to comment or (please) dissuade me from potentially
> making a costly mistake? ;-)
I don't think it needs to be either/or -- I run sfront under Linux
at work doing real-time things, and I run sfront at home using OS X
doing real-time things, and both more or less work OK.
Personally, I think the biggest issues are the different approaches
OS X and Linux takes on real-time scheduling (constraint scheduling
for OS X, SCHED_FIFO and friends for Linux), and on the need and
methods for keeping the application in RAM to avoid swapping (the
sfront OS X port took at lot of work to get this right, and in some
ways sfront has a simple memory usage pattern ...). I think Linux
may have something to learn from OS X on the former issue, and OS X
may have something to learn from Linux on the latter issue -- at
the moment at least, the "lazy swap-in" in OS X, even when the
machine has hundreds of MBytes sitting unused, forces the application
to do its own implicit memory management to avoid artifacts during
start up.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley
lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sun Jun 22 2003 - 00:39:27 EEST