Re: Documentation request - realtime abilities and how to use them

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Henning Sprang wrote:

> Hy,
> When using beast i encounter  sometimes light cliocks and things, especially
> when i do thinks in Gnome in between, so it looks like a performance
> problem, which don't believe I have, because I have a processor that is
> pretty much
> fast enough (AMD Athlon 2400+ or something).
>
> I believe what i must do is using Beast's realtime capabilities, which I
> don't know how this can be done. I just think, from reading docs of other
> pieces
> of software, i must do some things with my Linux Kernel, but i didn't figure
> out exactly how and what to do, mainly because i didn't have the time to
> find the information needed.
>
> Therefore i have two questions:
>
> 1) Does anybody has an easy to understand ans short documentation on how
> getting beast to run with realtime features enabled
> 2) could we place that on the website, so other users get that info easily,
> too?

i don't have a good and perfect answer to that currently.
mid-term, i'm planning to install a sudo helper for beast that gives -19
priorities to the synthesis engine threads, so drop outs due to the synthesis
thread not getting scheduled are >>unlikely<< (not impossible though) to occour.

but giving hard round-robin rt-priorities (like with sched_setscheduler(2))
to a desktop application like beast is _not_ right. basically, with
round-robin scheduling, beast threads would always run when needed, but
also would get run if the code runs into a buggy endless-loop (e.g. within
a LADSPA plugin), causing the machine to effectively halt.
i.e. SCHED_RR or SCHED_FIFO is unly usefull if you can guarantee to some
extend that your application is almost bug free. that's comlpetely impractical
for an ordinary desktop application that loads third-party plugins though.

>
> Henning
>

---
ciaoTJ