[pulseaudio-discuss] Google ChromeOS reinventing the wheel, ignoring PulseAudio

[Arun Raghavan]

On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 10:02 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Hi Taylor,
> 
> [ I've CC'ed a couple other potentially interested parties ]
> 
> 'Twas brillig, and Taylor Hutt at 27/09/11 21:56 did gyre and gimble:
> > Hello folks,
> > 
> > I am indeed the one doing the majority of the work on the ADHD system at
> > present, and I can answer questions about it.  As a bit of background,
> > PulseAudio was attempted for a while before my time on the Chromium OS
> > project.  The results for some of the hardware we have were not very
> > inspiring -- at idle, I was told Pulse would take 30% of the CPU.  So,
> > Pulse was removed, and the sound system sat for a long while.  The guy
> > originally in charge of sound decided to work on something else and I
> > took the responsibility.

Do you have any more information on what was measured to get to the 30%
figure and how, btw? I'm curious, because on most modern hardware, we
should be performing reasonably well. I'm sure there are areas for
improvement, but PA does run on some fairly low-power hardware.

For example, you have PulseAudio running fine on a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8
processor (the Nokia N900) and I've even helped someone get it running
on a 400 MHz MIPS (albeit that didn't handle resampling very well at
all).

Cheers,
Arun