[linux-audio-dev] soft synth as a plugin

[Steve Harris]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 05:00:39 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> i think you need to scan back a year or 18 months in the archives to
> where we measured this. the context switch under linux can be
> extremely quick - on the order of 20-50 usecs on a PII-450, and is not

Do we know if this is getting better or worse? My experince of large cache
Xeons is that they context switch very slowly (compared with PII's of the
same generation). Whats the switch time on P4's and AthlonXP's like?

> this is why JACK is designed in the way that it is, and why it
> (theoretically) allows for both in-process and out-of-process
> "plugins". this allows programmers to choose which model they want to
> use. i predict that any API that forces the programmer to use a
> particular toolkit will fail. JACK's problem in this arena is that its

Which raises another important point, IMHO any softsynth API that wasn't
jack backed would have to have some pretty good reasons.

- Steve