Re: Resolution to republish MSP as a note

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Stéphane Letz <letz@grame.fr> wrote:

> >
> > I'm probably badly misinformed, but the value of high priority threads
> seems a bit vague to me, since I'm not sure about what's the OS support
> level for high-priority threads, I think for example in Linux you still
> have to compile your own kernel to get real high priority thread support.
>
> No. You would possibly need a special kernel for very ¨*low latency*
> thread scheduling, but not for RT scheduling and thread priority
> management. A regular Linux kernel is now quite usable, assuming the audio
> thread can take RT scheduling capability, which is given using Realtime Kit
> in PulseAudio AFAICS or correctly setting a special "realtime" group with
> appropriate values (see here for JACK:
> http://jackaudio.org/realtime_vs_realtime_kernel and
> http://jackaudio.org/linux_rt_config)
>

Thought I'd be misinformed! Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for the
mixup.


> On OSX real-time threads are actually "time constraints" threads, that are
> going to preempt any other non RT thread and are "interleaved" with other
> RT threads. The CoreAudio callback will run in a real-time constraints
> started and configurated by the CoreAudio frameworks for the audio
> application.
>
> > And using high-priority threads might not always even be desirable, for
> example in low-end devices it'd be horrible if the UI became completely
> unusable because an audio thread was occupying the whole thread.
>
> But if not RT, then the audio will "glitch"... Do we want reliable audio?
> or not?
>

I think you mean to ask "do we want audio in RT threads", because even that
doesn't always warrant reliable audio nor does not having it exclude
reliable audio. The answer to that question would be sometimes yes,
sometimes not. Glitchless audio isn't worth much if the application becomes
otherwise completely unusable. Is high-priority audio threads a feature
that warrants for the complexity that comes with the native nodes?
Especially given that we still have the possibility of RT thread workers
open.

I'm pretty sure that for example my Android phone doesn't run it's audio in
a real-time thread, even networking connections can sometimes glitch the
audio. But it's never bothered me, I'd actually rather have the UI in an RT
thread like iOS does and have that always go before the audio and anything
else for that matter. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Cheers,
Jussi