[LAU] KVM virtual machines and jack

Reuben Martin reuben.m at gmail.com
Fri Dec 11 21:09:36 EST 2009


On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:18 AM, torbenh <torbenh at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:48:04AM -0600, Reuben Martin wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 4:14 AM, Patrick Shirkey
>> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 12/06/2009 03:20 PM, Reuben Martin wrote:
>> >> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Paul Davis<paul at linuxaudiosystems.com>  wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Reuben Martin<reuben.m at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> Does anybody know if it is possible to run a guest OS under KVM and
>> >>>> have the ins and outs of the virtual audio device presented to that
>> >>>> OS, interface with JACK on the host linux system?
>> >>>>
>> >>>> I've done a little googling on this but couldn't find anything.
>> >>>> (mostly because "jack" is ambiguous, and "KVM" can mean a lot of
>> >>>> things)
>> >>>>
>> >>> unless the VM software that provides fake audio devices to the guest
>> >>> OS knows about JACK internally or can be configured to use it, this is
>> >>> not happening.
>> >>> on the other hand, if the VM software can simply use the ALSA JACK
>> >>> plugin, that could potentially work (lots and lots of latency though).
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >> In that case I guess my best bet would probably be to petition KVM
>> >> development to add support for JACK. Currently I believe it supports
>> >> ALSA, OSS, SDL and PulseAudio.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > If KVM already supports those api's then it can  be used with jack via
>> > several different methods. What is the problem that you are having exactly?
>> >
>>
>> No problems yet. I'm putting together a new system and had thought of
>> using Windows and Mac as guest VM systems under KVM for running things
>> that don't exist for Linux and/or don't work well with WINE. And I
>> wanted to see if anybody had tried routing the VM audio ins / outs to
>> JACK rather than directly to an audio sink.
>>
>> Wanted to see if anybody had seriously tried this before I gave it a go.
>
> using netjack and the master running at -p1024 seems to be working fine.
> at least when i compress the audio, and there is not too much gfx memory
> transfers.
>
> i have put a windows build of jacknone-0.4 on http://netjack.sf.net
> this is basically jack-1.9.4 with qjackctl and a fixed audioadapter.
> it includes netone with celt-0.7 and jack_trans2midi which generates
> midi clock... so you can sync your windows apps to jack transport.
>
>
> --
> torben Hohn
>

Very nice. The part about having an ASIO based netjack interface is a
key element that I was not aware existed.  And the jack-midi virtual
device solves the transport issue as well. I need to give this a try
once I finish building my new system.

I'll also be interested to see how well routing netjack connections
between a windows guest and mac guest works out. Should be
interesting.

Perhaps in cases like this where more than one jack process is
competing for processor time, Round Robin scheduling might work
better...

I'm interested to see how KVM compares to VirtualBox. From what I
understand it's a bit faster / lower latency because it "runs closer
to the metal" compared to VirtualBox / Xen / VMware.

-Reuben



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