From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Wed Feb 10 12:27:58 1999
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From: "Benjamin GOLINVAUX" <golinvaux@benjamin.net>
To: <alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz>
Subject: Re: MIDI/PCM synchro
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:22:27 +0100
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I'm fed up with these timing issues...

Everytime one needs a good timer, things always end in putting the relevant
code in kernel space.

Do you really think a modern operating system can't offer more options to
programmers than putting their code in kernel space ?

you _all_ know that audio, midi, video, process control and even (to a minor
extent) games BADLY need good timing performances.

Everyone seems to bother with Windows performance with real-time audio/video
apps (my god ! how choppy that video is.... why can't it be better ? I used
to watch Wing Commander video on my 486 !!!! Hey... that $1000 audio card...
why can't I sync midi and audio ? I got a PII 450 !!!!!!!) but I don't think
Linux is, from an architectural point of view, better (yes I know ALSA
latency is very good... But is it useful since creating a process or
accessing to disk can spoil this latency).

You know debugging kernel code is painful.... BeOS has adressed these issues
by providing user space threads with good multimedia timing. SGI has also
patched IRIX to reduce audio latency. And I'm afraid Windows won't be long
before providing decent real-time _for multimedia_ (I'm not talking about
process control s resolution for windows).

I'm sure the only solution will be to modify Linux too, because once Windows
2000 does it or when BeOS has more success, no one will take multimedia
under Linux seriously....

KURT (kansas university real-time linux) might be an option... It allows one
to schedule user space events... However, people won't use kernel
modifications unless they are well supported. I don't know the future of
KURT.

I wanted to code a reliable audio app and had no time to stuggle with KURT,
ALSA drivers and Linux kernel before being able to code my stuff so I
switched to BeOS... And I can tell you it has a very very good API.

Please, try to make Linux better by advocating better user-space timing...
If some people are interested, please let me know... I might switch back to
Linux and learn to hack the kernel if I'm not alone.



