Re: [OT] ALSA userspace API complexity

Jaroslav Kysela
2006-01-10T09:54:32Z

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Hannu Savolainen wrote:

> What happens if some system load peak delays the application by 20 ms? The
> result is complete failure. What is the ALSA (API) feature OSS doesn't
> have that makes it able to predict what kind of output the application
> should have fed to the device during the (about) 20 ms period of silence?
>
> The fact is that there is nothing the audio subsystem can do to recover
> the situation. For this very simple reason the OSS API lacks everything
> that would be necessary to cope with this kind of problems.

Applications should be notified that something is broken. If you have
a professional environment, you really need to know, if the output
survived all scheduling peaks and the audio data are delivered from/to
I/O in time.

Also, in the standard consumer environment is good to know that the system
have some trouble to deliver data in time (motivating developers of core
Linux kernel code or subsystems, or motivating app programers to set the
correct scheduling parameters) to fix remaining problems.

Jaroslav

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Jaroslav Kysela <perex@suse.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, SUSE Labs