[pulseaudio-discuss] Distribution kernels and glitch-free (Packagers, read this!)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 24.02.09 12:20, Jan Claeys (lists at janc.be) wrote:

> 
> Op maandag 23-02-2009 om 15:18 uur [tijdzone -0500], schreef Sean
> McNamara:
> > * Once upon a time (old releases, e.g. 7.04 and below?) there was the
> > -lowlatency kernel flavor. This one went all the way and gave us
> > CONFIG_HZ=1000 and a fully preemptible kernel (not only voluntary, but
> > forced preemption). I'm not sure of the rationale for discontinuing
> > this kernel flavor, but it would be silly to say it's only because of
> > mirror disk space or something; their disk space consumption has gone
> > way up since then.
> 
> Maybe have a look at the -rt kernel?  :)
> 
> (There is a fourth kernel too: -virtual, which is optimized for running
> in a virtual machine, where the number of hardware to support is much
> lower than in real machines.)

I cannot say I believe in the -rt kernel. We don't need *that*
reliable latencies for PA. And given that -rt in real live breaks more
things than it fixes I don't think it is really worth the effort if
all you want to do is run PA.

The vanilla kernel is mostly fine for doing multimedia work, even for
audio production. There's no need to bother with -rt.

Let's keep things in perspective. PA is not a super-ultra-low-latency
sound server. It's a desktop sound server ... that is all. All I am
asking for is for latencies not as bad as 210 ms!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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