20 Jul
2009
20 Jul
'09
2:09 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Paul Davis<paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Jack
O'Quin<jack.oquin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I see your point and share your frustration.
To be fair (not always easy), their objection to genuine realtime
scheduling rests on a perception (real or imagined) that these tools
may open up Denial of Service attacks on *all* users -- not just the
few doing serious audio production. Although I am not aware of any
genuine DoS attacks of that sort, distribution developers still have a
responsibility to take the possibility seriously.
So even here, I believe their motive remains to make things as easy as
possible for (most) users to do (most) everything they like. For a
general-purpose distribution, that's probably the best anyone can do.
Despite the fact that negative nice values are
ineffective for
achieving solid realtime audio, I doubt we'll see many distributions
jumping into the role of discouraging that style of programming.
Most distribution developers see their role as packaging Linux
applications in a form that makes them easily accessible to end users.
They generally avoid highly technical discussions about "how those
applications should be written".
If enough users want to run "nice-audio" applications, they are likely
to enable that behavior. Why shouldn't they?
given that many distributions have actively resisted enabling the
correct approach to writing such applications, i don't see why they
should not be encouraged to reverse themselves on both fronts: enable
the right way, and discourage the wrong way. it is crazy to claim that
they simply want to make things easily accessible to end users - the
debian packagers, for example, have argued that using SCHED_{FIFO,RR}
is wrong and that no app should be using memlock. so, they *do* take
positions ... i'm just saying they need a new one, and that is that
making lower nice values available for *this* purpose is wrong. there
may, of course, be other reasons to permit it. From their point of view, "nice -10" is quite
harmless, so they see no
need to disallow it.
--
joq