[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] Do not use tsched watermark if tsched is disabled

[David Henningsson]

2010-09-02 16:06, pl bossart skrev:
>> Agreed: You can pick those two patches, and then we add a third patch to
>> both branches, which brings back the watermark for tsched devices and 20
>> ms for non-tsched. Assuming my suspicion is not disproved, of course.
>> What does Pierre think of that?
> 
> I don't want the watermark to be used for rewinds. The watermark is
> there for timer-based scheduling, so that you have enough time to
> wake-up from sleep and still refill the buffer.
> The rewinds happens when the processor is already awake, pulseaudio up
> and running and only the remix part needs to happen. Plus the
> watermark varies and the logic could really be improved.
> 
> Also I think 20ms for rewinds is way too much. This will kill your
> actual latency. Imagine you have a low-latency app that starts, the
> first sample would be heard after at best 20ms. Not acceptable for
> speech or interactive sounds.
> 
> But I agree that 256-bytes isn't fool-proof for heavy duty use cases
> such 8ch 192kHz 32-bit float.
> 
> So how about we keep 256 bytes (1.33 ms for 48kHz) but add a 1.33 ms
> threshold to make sure we never rewind below.
> 
> rewind_safeguard = max(256, pa_usec_to_bytes(1330));
> 
> This way you solve both the hardware issue (frequency independent) and
> leave enough headroom for the system to avoid underflows.

Whether 1,33 ms or 20 ms is best - I assume your guess is as good as
mine. Colin, feel free to go ahead with Pierre's suggestion - it's
likely to be good enough.

As for the watermark usage, I admit to not knowing enough of CPU
scheduling and wake-up times to either prove Pierre right or wrong.

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic