On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 11:30 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> The ACPI/SMM Latency Problem
> While testing the RT preemption patches we discovered that many, many
> laptops are unsuitable for low latency audio work.
> The laptops in question have a BIOS that implements ACPI via SMM.
> According to AC this is a known broken design (in addition to audio, it
> causes these systems to lose timer ticks with HZ=1000), but by his
> estimate more than half of laptops have the problem.
>
> There is no 100% reliable way to tell if you have the ACPI/SMM problem.
> If you need really low latency, in the mllisecond range, this is a
> showstopper! So I think the best approach is for the Linux audio
> community to create a "whitelist" of known good laptops.
Wow, I'd heard about this SMM issue but didn't know it was so bad. I
guess I'm lucky, I've been able to get ~6ms latency with USB. Dell
Inspiron 5100.
Completely coincidentally, this morning I was just thinking about the
low latency wiki, and wondering if a whitelist would be a good addition.
I also have some webspace to donate to such a cause.
-ry
-- Ryan Gallagher <ruinaudio@email-addr-hidden>Received on Thu Feb 10 08:15:05 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Feb 10 2005 - 08:15:05 EET