[linux-audio-user] Linux for live performance

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 00:14 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Lee Revell hat gesagt: // Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 23:03 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> > > The good thing is, that with barebones the manufacturer often tries to
> > > follow the standards a bit more, because in the long run it will make
> > > it easier for them as far as support etc. is concerned. These
> > > barebones are sold under various different brandnames, so they like to
> > > keep this side of possible failures as small as possible. 
> > 
> > Right, but I don't think there's any standard that says laptops must be
> > usable for low latency or prohibits the BIOS from implementing ACPI via
> > SMM...
> > 
> > The only way to be sure is if there were a vendor who sold laptops
> > certified for low latency.
> 
> As this probably won't happen (soon)

It could - it seems to me that it would only be a little work for a
vendor to set up such a program relative to the sales it would generate.
Just add some kind of RTC based latency test to the burn-in suite.
Seems to me if it takes a day to set up and generated even 5-10 sales it
would be worthwhile...

>  maybe it's indeed best to try to
> create a kind of whitelist as you suggested. And of course a
> blacklist, which could create pressure on manufacturers.

Right now all I have is some anecdotal evidence that many Acer laptops
seem to have the ACPI/SMM bug.  Can someone with an Acer laptop confirm
or deny this?

>  I guess, not
> only Linux is affected by a latency-killing BIOS, right? 
> 

Yes, in theory.  So presumably if you found good anecdotal evidence that
a given laptop is good for live audio with Windows it *should* be OK for
Linux...

> Ciao