[linux-audio-dev] kernel 2.6.6 just out

Takashi Iwai tiwai at suse.de
Thu May 13 12:38:39 UTC 2004


At Wed, 12 May 2004 15:22:06 +0200,
Alfons Adriaensen wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 03:03:27PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> 
> > Jens M Andreasen hat gesagt: // Jens M Andreasen wrote:
> 
> > > To reiterate the question: SuSE 9.0 or Mandrake 10.0?
> 
> I've been using a standard SuSE 9.0 (2.4) for about six months now,
> and it performs very well for audio work. SuSE kernels normally
> have (most of) the low-latency and pre-emption patches built-in
> from the start.

no, preemption patch is not included.

>  I don't know what SuSE did with the experimental
> 2.6 in 9.0 or the official 2.6 in 9.1.

some additional lowlatency patches are in SUSE 9.1 kernel.
most of them have been already included in mm tree.

again, no preemption in 9.1 kernel.
SUSE's policy is to ship the same kernel for all ranges, i.e. from
consumer to server.  preemption may bring too much overhead for the
highend use.
(in the case of 2.6 kernels, one can rebuild easily own kernel with
 preemption, though.)


in my test cases, reiserfs is working well on my machine.

there are still some latency causes.  in addition to driver-specific
problems (e.g. sis900 results in 3ms peaks in the timer interrupt
context), VM/FS-related things like RCU handling in tasklet, dcache
shrinking, etc. may result in some high latencies.  but it won't
happen unless you create/remove thousands of files at once.

perhaps the bigger problem is the latency in drm modules, as Fernando
reported.  (i disable DRM on my machine, so didn't notice it.)


Takashi



More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list