14 Feb
2023
14 Feb
'23
4:32 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 03:57:05PM +0100, Wim Taymans wrote:
It's of course not 'active polling' (spending all CPU time on
testing a condition), but it is still polling in the sense
that it is NOT the event you wait for (having enough samples
to start a Jack cycle) that wakes you up. When using a timer
you just test for that condition periodically, which means
you can be up to that period late.
To avoid loss of period processing time, the timer period
must a very small fraction of the Jack period time. And
then I wonder what is the advantage.
The real
difference between the two methods is 'sample count'
versus 'time' as the source of the event that starts a period.
I always wondered why one would use a timer, it just amounts
to polling. Suppose you look every 1 ms to check if there
You don't need to use polling with timerfd, just set the timeout
according to some clock,
add the timerfd to some poll loop and it wakes up on time. Very much like how ALSA wakes you up when a period
expires.
AFAIK, ALSA doesn't use timers for that.
For a sound card on e.g. a PCI bus the start of cycle would
be the indirect result of an hardware interrupt. For USB
or firewire cards, it would be triggered by an event from
the lower (USB/firewire) layers.
BTW, what about the 'signed differences' issue I pointed
out earlier ?
Ciao,
--
FA