From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Paul Barton-Davis Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 17:07:02 +0000 Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] streaming from disk to terminatorX added (via mmap) Message-Id: List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-sound@vger.kernel.org Benno writes: >Since the kernel loads pages of the file into mem when they are >needed, it could cause audio-dropouts when working with low audio >buffer sizes (low latency) since, the playing thread might wait too >long for the kernel which tries to load the pages into mem. >One trick to avoid this it to add a low priority thread , which does >basically read-ahead and read-behind, by accessing to pages before >and past the actual playing position. It doesn't matter if this >thread blocks for a moment, since it doesn't play any audio data. >The audio thread will always find the needed pages in memory and will >not drop out. i know that est@hyperreal.org will have something to say about this :) well, perhaps not, but he should. oolaboola (sp?) has been evolving toward some fairly sophisticated memory management to handle this kind of stuff.