Re: [LAD] No nagging, a serious question

From: Dan Mills <dmills@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun Jul 04 2010 - 23:52:11 EEST

On Sun, 2010-07-04 at 22:15 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-07-04 at 20:57 +0100, James Morris wrote:
>
> A comparison to the C64 is caring it to extremes, perhaps I should
> compare to at least 80286.
> It became very hard to learn and it was very easy years ago. Not
(only)
> failure by Linux, but also because of hardware standards that might be
> less good for audio/MIDI.

Trying again, I accidentally sent this off list the first time....

It is more that a general purpose preemptive multitasking OS is less
good for audio/midi.

If you are working in a world where you know the available hardware in
detail LOTS of things become easy, for example I can time stamp an
incoming MIDI byte with the sample number of reported as current
position by the sound card (There is only one), instant way to get
effectively zero latency jitter.
This doesn't work nearly so well when there is more then one sound card,
the MIDI UART has effectively a fixed fifo (USB midi), and there is an
SMM interrupt that cannot be masked.
 
Conversely the upside is that we can mostly plug in a soundcard or a
midi interface designed after the application and the thing will work.

> Linux audio on RISC CPUs?

I have done audio on ARM if that counts (Both under Linux and on bare
sand). If you need to support a GUI and networking Linux is a huge win,
otherwise if just implementing a special purpose audio cruncher you are
better off running standalone.

Regards, Dan.

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Received on Mon Jul 5 00:15:03 2010

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