linuxaudio.org

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:

quoted text
> Heya,

>

> Just a quick announcement:

>

> I just moved into Fedora Rawhide a little daemon called "RealtimeKit"

> which will be enabled by default, and since it is now a dependency of

> PulseAudio and things work how they work this will then not only be

> available in Fedora 12 but also sooner or later in the other

> distributions as well, installed by default.

>

> So what does this do? It's a simple policy daemon that hands out

> SCHED_RR scheduling to normal user processes/threads that ask for it.

This appears to be a baroque mechanism designed to solve a problem

suspectible to vastly simpler solutions. Alternatively, one could see

it as a baroque mechanism designed to solve to solve a problem that

really needs a much more sophisticated solution (i.e. better

scheduling policies). Either way, it seems like something that makes

things more complex on every level, not less. Take a look at the code

in libjack/thread.c and compare and contrast what is necessary to get

a realtime thread on Linux (already) compared to OS X. You're adding a

new API for this that will not be backwards compatible beyond a kernel

change that has only just been made. I cannot imagine wanting to use

this mechanism. You also seem to have assumed that everyone agrees

that SCHED_RR is the correct policy, rather than SCHED_FIFO.

Reasonable people still disagree about this. Finally, as Chris said -

many of us are writing apps that target multiple platforms, and adding

a new dependency on non-POSIX systems like DBus in order to get done

things that are supposed to be possible with the POSIX API ... well,

it gives some of us a slightly wierd feeling at the very least.
--p

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