On 6/17/07, Dave Hayes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Back in the day, we keyboard players could easily have 5-6 pieces of outboard synth rack gear in use at once. It would be really nice to do this virtually, someday, and muliple-core CPUs are most likely the low-level answer. DFly's project goals are great infrastructure support for this kind of application.
DragonFly's basic attitude towards kernel-side processing is "aggregate work more". Which means the focus is on getting larger chunks of work done at a time, so that the best use of cache and reduced switching can be made, which is basically the opposite of preemption. So unless a special architecture is put in place to give audio recording a sort of preemptive capacity, it's doubtful that DragonFly can make even pseudo-real-time guarantees. But if Matt is right and all it takes is giving the audio handling higher priority so the desync is minimised, then it doesn't seem like such a big deal. But this does not match up with the rest of the world's observation that it's a hard problem. So It may be that DragonFly and probably NetBSD will be left out of the real-time space for a while yet. I think FreeBSD is already well on the way to the kernel side of pseudo-real-time sound but if it needs an ALSA-like API then that could take some work. --- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
