I might get flamed for this however GUI should not really be run with rt priority,
that is an honour for the DSP engines. There are some reasonable arguments
however for leaning on the scheduler with renice for the user interfaces to give
them a bit of a bias over other system operations. Admittedly a big topic since
the GUI probably sits on top of the windowing system anyway.

So I have not used renice on graphics/GUI processes but I have worked on
systems where the RT DSP code is happily chewing up 75% of CPU to churn
out 32 unified synth voices and the GUI response can then give a bad impression
of an application. Renice will help the sometime intensive graphics manipulation
code (which is surprisingly close to DSP anyway if you are doing subpixel image
transforms with shadow rendering) to get a little more of the now starved system
resources.

I don't see any point to advise not giving the audio group access to this option
since you can argue that, whilst it does not do anything very spectacular, it is not
going to damage system integrity any further than the already active RT priority
rights. Low latency audio systems are all about tuning and this remains one of
the tools available to you.

Regards, cnik.

"we have to make sure the old choice [Windows] doesn't disappear”.
Jim Wong, president of IT products, Acer




> Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 07:27:39 -0400
> From: paul@linuxaudiosystems.com
> To: ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net
> CC: linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
> Subject: Re: [LAD] Any package builders here?
>
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> > Hi :)
> >
> > could you please add a dependency to audio/MIDI app packages for your
> > distros, that will set up real-time usage?
> >
> > The following issue is wide spread:
> >
> >        -------- Forwarded Message --------
> >        > Be sure you are able to run audio apps with the right
> >        privileges, eg.
> >        > add your user to the "audio" group in /etc/groups and check
> >        > out /etc/security/limits.conf for these lines
> >        > @audio          -       rtprio          100
> >        > @audio          -       nice            -10
>
> for the n-hundreth time: nice has no role to play in improving the
> performance of pro-audio/music creation software.
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