[Jack-Devel] How does --hwmon work?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 06 May 2017 17:25:59 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> writes:
>>Consider to ask RME why they don't support Linux.  
>
>RME?  The company that provided all the information needed for writing
>stable ALSA interfaces for the RME Hammerfall, writing hdspconf, and
>writing hdspmixer?  I think they've done everything expected from a
>nice player.  The usefulness of what they have done definitely beats
>the crap from companies "supporting" Linux like Nvidia, with no
>information but proprietary drivers that stop working after a number
>of years.
>
>RME hasn't written hdspconf.  They only made it possible.

RME does not support Linux by themselves, so even if they made something
possible, there is no support.
For my RME card hdspmixer works [1], but hdspconf doesn't [2]. That
hdspconf doesn't work isn't an issue, but just 2 of 8 ADAT channels are
available by the jack ports. IMO the best bet nowadays is to use USB
class compliant audio interfaces. When I was jobless at the end of last
year, I bought the Focusrite. I now have a full-time job for the next
1½ years, so I might replace the Focusrite Scarlett 2nd Gen by an RME
USB class compliant audio interface. With my old computer, as well as
with my brand-new computer, I get lower latencies when using the USB
Focusrite, than when using the RME PCIe card. I suspect that with a
round trip latency of around 6 ms or much lower, it's possible to even
use software monitoring, since around 5 ms is the latency you get, when
using one or the other digital guitar stomp box, too. 6 ms is the
maximum of latency I get for resource hungry projects, it's possible to
get lower. The used mobo, CPU, RAM and a SSD are very cheap [3], it
already worked that good, with just half of the available RAM. So IMO,
if you don't want to use hdspmixer and/or a mixing console, consider to
use software monitoring. The latency isn't that bad anymore, even when
using such cheap hardware as I'm using.

[1]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ hdspmixer

HDSPMixer 1.11 - Copyright (C) 2003 Thomas Charbonnel <thomas at undata.org>
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
HDSPMixer is free software, see the file COPYING for details

Looking for RME cards:
Card 0: RME AIO S/N 0x579bcc at 0xf7d00000, irq 16
RME AIO found!
Card 1: TerraTec EWX24/96 at 0xd040, irq 16
Card 3: HDA Intel HDMI at 0xf7e10000 irq 30
Card 4: Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 USB at usb-0000:00:14.0-9, high speed
1 RME cards card found.
Restoring last presets used

[2]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ hdspconf 

HDSPConf 1.4 - Copyright (C) 2003 Thomas Charbonnel <thomas at undata.org>
This program comes WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
HDSPConf is free software, see the file copying for details

Looking for HDSP cards :
Card 0 : RME AIO S/N 0x579bcc at 0xf7d00000, irq 16
Card 1 : TerraTec EWX24/96 at 0xd040, irq 16
Card 3 : HDA Intel HDMI at 0xf7e10000 irq 30
Card 4 : Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 USB at usb-0000:00:14.0-9, high speed
No Hammerfall DSP card found.

[3]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo dmidecode -s baseboard-manufacturer
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo dmidecode -s baseboard-product-name
B85M-D3H
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ hwinfo --cpu|grep Mo|sort -u
  Model: 6.60.3 "Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU G1840 @ 2.80GHz"
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ hwinfo --memory|grep Si
  Memory Size: 7 GB + 512 MB