Re: a joint letter on low latency and Linux

[Paul Barton-Davis]

>I'd like to remind people that we're at Linux 2.4.0test2, and **test**,
>plus Linus's earlier declaration of a code (really feature) freeze imples
>this is probably not the time to be making changes to core kernel
>internals?   

Well, I'm sympathetic to this. But just yesterday, I saw Stephen
Tweedie saying that the VM system needed another fairly significant
redesign begore it could be considered ready for 2.4.0. Of course, I
was completely mystified just what Linus was thinking with this
numbering choice. Switching to 2.4-anything when the VM system and
streaming disk I/O are still clearly not working correctly seemed
incredible to me.

>Multimedia applications are the only ones people have listed that for
>which I'm even remotely sympathetic, and there I agree that 100-300ms
>latency in the kernel is bad, and we need to get that down.  But please,
>make that a 2.5 priority.  
>
>(I'll note that on my SMP machine, I'm running MP3 decoders much of the
>time, and in practice very rarely hear any dropouts.  So the folks who
>are painting such a dire picture of the state of Multimedia are
>overstating their case a little, I think.)

I purposely did *not* use the term multimedia to describe what most of
the signees are up to. As I've stated many times, simple playback and
record of audio+MIDI (+video? don't know) under Linux works fine. One
might even say "very well".

But the real-time synthesis and processing stuff is a totally
different story, and the situation really *is* dire.

--p