Re: POSIX clocks and ALSA

[Heikki Lindholm <holindho@cs.helsinki.fi>]

Takashi Iwai kirjoitti:
> At Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:59:29 +0200,
> Heikki Lindholm wrote:
>> Jaroslav Kysela kirjoitti:
>>> On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Heikki Lindholm wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Some years ago there was some talk about UST support in Linux, but the 
>>>> support never happened. With the hrtimers patch (and I'm not quite sure 
>>>> if even earlier?) CLOCK_MONOTONIC would seem like a fairly good UST time 
>>>> source. What I'd like to see, is a selectable clock for ALSA 
>>>> timestamping, e.g. something like snd_sw_params_clock(..., clockid_t 
>>>> clk). Would this seem plausible? I don't know that much about ALSA 
>>>> internals, so, no idea whether different clocks on different 
>>>> pcms/whatever would quickly turn into an unmanageable mess.
>>> We are aware about this extension and I already proposed an 
>>> implementation. I hope to implement it soon. Timestamps are not used in 
>>> driver internally.
>> I can't seem to google up the proposal. I'd like to read it; was it on 
>> the alsa ml?
> 
> Yes, it was on alsa-devel ML.  At that time I didn't like the proposal
> much because currently there was no real user of timestamps.
> 
> The addition of monolithc clock isn't hard, but it's an API change
> that involves with the kernel-side change.  So let's do it carefully.
> 
> But, honestly, I'm still concerned what to be done first.  Shouldn't
> we discuss about the usefulness of the timestamp at first?  That is,
> whether the current form (API, implementation) is the best or not,
> what kind of user would be, and how it's used.  So far, this feature
> is "simply there"...

IMHO the current API definitely isn't the best possible, but nothing 
better has been available on Linux, so it's a make-do situation. My 
ideal would be something resembling or even 1:1 copying SGI's media 
libraries where every media fragment is timestamped with the UST, and 
the timestamps are the starting time of the media chunk in question 
instead of ending/sometime after time. The problem with implementing the 
SGI API on Linux is that AFAICT no Linux supported/available hardware 
supports such timestamping.

Additionally, it might be nice to be able to add audio clocks as system 
wide clocks, so, that for example I could tell v4l to use timestamps 
from an audio clock instead of the system clock.

Allowing clock selection between CLOCK_REALTIME (for backwards 
compatibility) and CLOCK_MONOTONIC would, however, be a start.

-- Heikki Lindholm