Re: [ANNOUNCE] Interbench v0.21

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 14:01 +1000, Con Kolivas wrote:
> Interbech is a an application is designed to benchmark interactivity in Linux.
> 
> Version 0.21 update
> 
> http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/interbench/interbench-0.21.tar.bz2
> 

I would suggest using microseconds for both the RT and non RT tests.  It
would allow easier comparison of results.  I have a pretty slow machine
and the max result would only be ~44000 usecs.

Also, if it's run with -r and sched_setscheduler fails, rather than
saying "you must be root for SCHED_FIFO" the error message should
encourage the user to try a 2.6.12+ kernel and add themselves to the
"audio" or "realtime" group, and to file a feature request if their
distro does not support the new realtime rlimit feature.

We should encourage more applications to take advantage of, and distros
to support, the non-root RT scheduling available in 2.6.12+.  I really
think the kernel is good enough at this point that we could achieve
OSX-like multimedia performance on the desktop if more apps like xmms,
xine, and mplayer were to adopt a multithreaded model with the
time-critical rendering threads running RT.  XMMS recently adopted such
a model, but I don't think the audio thread runs SCHED_FIFO yet.  These
benchmarks imply that it would be a massive improvement.

Lee