Re: Are RT-patches needed anymore? (Was Re: >= 2.6.27 RT ETA?)

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On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 14:06 +0100, Peder Hedlund wrote:
> Quoting Ken Restivo <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 
> > And here is the next installment in the saga of trying to get Ingo   
> > RT going on my Asus EEE.
> >
> > I successfully built and ran the 2.6.26.8-rt12 with the alsa_seq   
> > patch. It ran.
> >
> > The problem is that neither the Ethernet (atl1e) or wireless   
> > (rt2860sta) work. So I pretty much had to reboot back out of it   
> > immediately.
> 
> I've been running the standard kernel from openSUSE 11.0 on my Athlon  
> 2000+ and can get down to at least 5.3ms latency on an Audiophile 2496  
> using the limits.conf "trick".
> 
> Do people really need lower latencies for music purposes or are we  
> just thinking "well, I needed the RT patch three years ago; I ain't  
> stopping now" ?

It depends on your usage (this question seems to come up every couple of
months lately). The current kernels are much better in low latency
applications than three years ago. They are usable if you don't require
"low" latencies (64 or 128 x 2). What you get also strongly depends on
the hardware mix you have. 

If you want to use 64 or 128 frame periods (or less) you probably will
need at rt patched kernel in most cases. Then again if an occasional
xrun is not a problem then you would be fine with the stock kernel. 

While going down to, say, 1 or 2 mSecs of latency might be thought of as
unnecessarily low, if your system can work at those levels then you are
going to be more likely to never get an xrun when running at 5 mSecs
latency. And if you are performing in a concert situation you _don't_
want an xrun, not even one. Linux, even rt patched, does not have a hard
realtime scheduler with deadline guarantees, etc. 

-- Fernando


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