Re: desktop and multimedia as an afterthought?

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

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Paul Davis writes:

>>It's too bad that the multimedia community didn't participate
>>much during the 2.5.xx development leading up to 2.6.0. If they
>>had done so, the situation might be different today. Fortunately,
>>fixing up the multimedia problems isn't too risky to do during
>>the stable 2.6.xx series.
> 
> I regret that this description is persisting here. "We" (the audio
> developer community) did not participate because it was made clear
> that our needs were not going to be considered. We were told that the
> preemption patch was sufficient to provide "low latency", and that
> rescheduling points dotted all over the place was bad engineering
> (probably true). With this as the pre-rendered verdict, there's not a
> lot of point in dedicating time to tracking a situation that clearly
> is not going to work.
> 
> The kernel is not going to provide adequate latency for multimedia
> needs without either (1) latency issues being front and center in
> every kernel developer's mind, which seems unlikely and/or (2)
> conditional rescheduling points added to the kernel, which appears to
> require non-mainstreamed patches.

Please dont start a low level flamewar over this. Latency is firmly on the 
agenda and under consideration for the mainline kernel now. 

There is nothing wrong with using a dedicated alternative patchset for 
specific tasks, as long as any lessons learnt from it are also taken into 
consideration for mainline. Mainline kernels must have (high gain)/(low 
risk) ratio changes only. 

Rather than just saying that the desktop and multimedia is not considered it 
would be more helpful to say what helps where and why in the public forum of 
the main kernel mailing list. Off list discussion can go completely 
unnoticed (even I wasn't aware of my patchset being used and quoted!)

Cheers,
Con


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