[LAU] multiJACK patch management: the first glimmerings of success

[Jonathan E. Brickman]

For those who may be interested, I am seeing the first small glimmering 
of what looks like real success, in running multiple JACK servers on one 
box for the purpose of distributing DSP load.  I can now reliably have 
two netjack1 slaves connect to one netjack1 master, the master running 
ALSA to hardware, all within one Linux box under one kernel and one 
filesystem.

The way that this works is "containerization" or "sandboxing", which can 
give an IP to anything ranging from one running binary to a large 
collection.  I started the current effort using Docker containerization, 
but its standard setups require a lot of filesystem recreation, each 
Docker container has an entire working OS filesystem apart from the 
kernel; but during the studies for Docker, I blundered into something 
else called firejail, and firejail appears to be just what the doctor 
ordered, it seems to do just about everything while using the existing 
filesystem, and one can very easily turn off the features one doesn't need.

To cut to the chase, after boot and system prep, first one creates an IP 
bridge:

    sudo brctl addbr br0
    sudo ifconfig br0 10.99.99.1/24

and then starts JACK in the sandboxes:

    # The master hardware sandbox is named MASTER, the QJackCTL profile
    is named MASTER,
    # the JACK server is named MASTER.
    nohup firejail --name=MASTER --noprofile --net=br0 --ip=10.99.99.10 \
         /usr/bin/jackd -n MASTER -m -dalsa -r48000 -p256 -n2 -Xseq -D
    -Chw:NVidia -Phw:NVidia \
         > ~/LOGS/jack-master.log &


    # The SRO hardware sandbox is named SRO, the QJackCTL profile for it
    is named SRO,
    # the JACK server is named SRO.
    nohup firejail --name=SRO --noprofile --net=br0 --ip=10.99.99.15 \
         /usr/bin/jackd -n SRO -dnetone \
         > ~/LOGS/jack-sro.log &


    # Ditto for STRINGS.
    nohup firejail --name=STRINGS --noprofile --net=br0 --ip=10.99.99.20 \
         /usr/bin/jackd -n STRINGS -dnetone \
         > ~/LOGS/jack-strings.log &

And then connects the JACK servers, by adding jack_netsource processes 
into the existing MASTER sandbox:

    #!/bin/bash

    # SRO
    nohup firejail --join=MASTER jack_netsource -s MASTER -H 10.99.99.15
     > ~/LOGS/netsource-sro.log &

    # STRINGS
    nohup firejail --join=MASTER jack_netsource -s MASTER -H 10.99.99.20
     > ~/LOGS/netsource-strings.log &

I have not tested further yet, no clients -- am working on something 
closer to production now -- but this is looking very good, the 
connections are reported successful, zero xruns, and on this prototyping 
box -- 2.6GHz AMD quad, ten-plus years old -- 0.8% DSP in use on all 
three JACK servers and very low memory usage.  This is considerably 
better than I had hoped.

The sandboxed binaries above, cannot reach outside the one box as 
written above, but the excellent and very responsive developer of 
Firejail has provided a method 
<https://github.com/netblue30/firejail/issues/372>. As a result this 
could all be done  box-independently -- for instance, if one's "monolith 
is the building" (going to have to remember that, Patrick), one could 
have all indicated motherboards NFS or SMB to one file server, and then 
use a central control GUI machine to run all firejails on whichever 
hardware was proven most appropriate, and testing could become much 
easier.  Along the way I also found 'xpra' likely to be a very good way 
to setup such a central control, am going to test that as a side project.

I tried using netjack2 first, but ran into mystery behavior, xruns 
started piling huge when the second slave connected.  So I went with 
netjack1, especially because Patrick Shirkey already proved the above 
paradigm in multibox mode using netjack1.  I am currently using netjack1 
under jackd2, but will change to netjack under jackd1 if a reason to do 
so appears.

I am now working on a working dual-JACK prototype, in a near-production 
design, as a next step towards a generally transportable MultiJACK Patch 
Management methodology and the next big build of my Box of No Return :-)

Cheers, and thanks everyone!!!!

-- 
Jonathan E. Brickman   jeb at ponderworthy.com   (785)233-9977
Hear us at http://ponderworthy.com -- CDs and MP3 now available! 
<http://ponderworthy.com/ad-astra/ad-astra.html>
Music of compassion; fire, and life!!!


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