17 Dec
2009
17 Dec
'09
11:54 a.m.
Lennart Poettering:
On Thu, 17.12.09 13:52, Kjetil S. Matheussen (k.s.matheussen(a)notam02.no) wrote:
Okay, I didn't know that. But this is still no reason
why ALSA shouldn't take care of mixing/scheduling/etc.
by itself plus providing low-latency performance
(with mixing) when that is required. Leaving out
mixing to third-parties, plus exposing a very
complicated low-level API and a complicated
plugin/configuration system (which probably
has taken a more time to develop than implementing
a proper mixing engine), has created lots of chaos.
Mixing works just fine, even when using ASIO.
Maybe you have to start
the asio program first though, I don't know. But still, there's no
reason why you shouldn't have a global option, lets say 256 frames
48000Hz, that everything mixes down to, and then software which needs
hardcore low-level performance must obey to that setting.
Uh, that's a great way to burn your battery.
If you care about more than pro audio, then you want to dynamically
adjust the sleep times based on the requirements of the clients
connected. That means you cannot use fixed sized hardware fragments
anymore, but need to schedule audio more dynamically using system
timers.
This in fact is where most of the complexity in systems such as
PulseAudio stems from.