[linux-audio-user] Ardour, Jack, and 2.6 kernels

[tim hall]

Robert Jonsson wrote:
> torsdagen den 27 maj 2004 19.16 skrev cv223 at comcast.net:
>>Do most people shut off non-essential daemons during recording sessions, or
>>do any other tricks?  This is kinda frustrating, as the CPU load seems
>>rather low (< 15% when the xrun happened).  I guess I'll test out reiserfs
>>and even ext2 to see if the filesystem is the culprit.
> 
> I actually run fullblown KDE most of the time, it works pretty well at 512x2, 
> I can run 256x2 but xruns get more frequent, but not unbearably so. I'm 
> mainly running MusE and I seldom get kicked out, but it does happen...
> 
> There has been talk on the Jack list from time to time about adding a mode 
> where you won't get kicked out so easily even if Jack misses a beat. 
> For developing jack I think the current approach is good, the audio equivalent 
> of an assert, but for real usage it is a little hard on the user. Especially 
> if you are doing a performance, then it's devastating.

It would be SO nice not to be kicked out so easily by Jack, it is often 
more of a problem than dropping a few samples, albeit, obviously no-one 
wants clicks on their recordings, especially if you just performed the 
perfect, unrepeatable take.

> To return to the subject, I hear others use lightweight window managers and do 
> stop all unnesesary services to get better stability, if you have problems it 
> will probably help.

Godyes! Mind you, I'm running a 600MHz Celeron on 192M RAM, so I've set 
up runlevel 5 not to run cron or anything else that is likely to want 
attention in the middle of a session, like xscreensaver, for instance. I 
also run openbox-3 and do whatever I can to avoid waking up the KDE 
leviathan. On a slightly more powerful machine I don't think it would 
make so much difference, KDE is resource hungry, but not too attention 
seeking :) The services you want to stop are those that would interupt 
the nice steady flow of data that you are trying to write to the HD.

cheers

tim hall

--

"You gotta remove part of the shell without breaking the skin, Grandma!"