Re: a joint letter on low latency and Linux

[Jesse Pollard]

[e-mail] (goingware.com):
[snip]
>I'd rather see Linux doing good audio than have to stick with the BeOS, but
>right now the audio performance of playing a single MP3 file just blows in
>the 2.4.0 series kernels.  This is with xaudio taking up 3% of the CPU at peak
>times, but it readily drops to 0 and the music shuts off until I move a window
>around in X.
>
>That sort of thing never happens in BeOS.

That actually sounds more like an application error. I don't use xaudio, but
I have seen applications hang when connected to X.

They usually hang waiting for their sync to the X server to complete. During
that delay the application doesn't do anything else (ie. no I/O read from
disk or written to audio device).

This is an indication that the user interface is not sufficiently isolated
from the real-time application code.

Now, when you get into a real-time user interface development, don't use
X. Use GGI, or the equivalent, directly. X isn't designed for real time and
until a multi-threaded X server is available don't expect it to be. I'm not
sure the response would be available even with a multi-threaded X server.

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Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: [e-mail]

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.