[LAD] [ANNOUNCE] Safe real-time on the desktop by default; Desktop/audio RT developers, read this!

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 18:00 -0400, drew Roberts wrote:
> On Monday 22 June 2009 17:37:20 Lennart Poettering wrote:
> >  The amount of constructive criticism in this thread is next
> > to zero, nobody even bothers to read the README before just fudding
> > around.
> 
> I am one of those who also haven't read the README. I have been trying to 
> follow this thread with a bit more than non-interested care though.
> 
> > rtkit is a just missing piece of the puzzle that allows distros to
> > enable RT by default for their desktop users.
> 
> Here is a small bit of an attempt at being constructive.
> 
> I don't think I saw any assertion in the thread as to the benefits of enabling 
> RT by default for all desktop users? (I may have missed it or forgotten it 
> though) What is gained by this? What are normal desktop users doing than 
> needs RT? (I am asking out of a large pool of ignorance here but I have a 
> feeling from the thread that people may not be seeing the benefit of 
> this...???)

Basically playing sound. So that playback does not skip and can have
reasonable latencies. If the process that is playing sound gets
preempted out because of the workload of the machine and can't feed the
sound card soon enough you get a click. Humans are very sensitive to
that (more than to, say, a missed frame in video playback). 

-- Fernando