Re: [Playerstage-developers] RT-Linux.

[Jack O'Q. <jac...@gm...>]

On 3/7/07, jr...@m-... <jr...@m-...> wrote:

> We're working with Player/Stage 2.0.3 on Ubuntu but we're considering
> migrate to RT-Linux.
>
> -                      Can this cause any kind of problem?
>
> -                      What are your impressions/experiences about use
> player with RT ? Doubts..? Advantages..? Disadvantage..? Problems..?
>
> PS is working very well on ubuntu but our application requires an estrict
> timing so for futures versions with a bigger load off CPU the system can be
> crashed.

I've been working with realtime Linux audio for many years now.
Audio is very sensitive to realtime scheduling problems.  We have
seen tremendous improvements in the realtime responsiveness of
the stock kernel.org 2.6.x kernel series.  That is mostly due to gradual
integregration of Ingo Molnar's RT patches into the base kernel.

If you find you need better realtime performance than you get with
current 2.6 kernels, I recommend applying his patchset as a first step.
It provides hard realtime within a standard kernel environment.

You'll need to do some tuning of the SCHED_FIFO thread priorities
of the interrupt handlers relative to your own player driver threads,
but there would be no change to the basic system environment of
your code.

I believe this would be much easier than porting to RT-Linux, and
you will probably be happy with the result.

There is a lot of information about this in the linux-audio-devel and
linux-audio-user mailing list archives.
-- 
 joq