On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 17:36 Europe/London, owen.churchcowley wrote:
I have spoken to some people about this. I have a good friend Kevin who is interested in music, and he has told me about some of his experiments with alsa, low latencies and preemptive kernel patches made, it was also interesting how that they worked together.
My mane interest was to be like windows and be able to play an mp3 some thing I never had done before, under linux this used to just stutter making the idea of playing them too unpleasant to bother with.
If you look to the other camp.. Mac OS X. They use a mach kernel and it handles a lot of work at the same time. iTunes was chugging away while I load umpteen applications, etc. Anything I throw at it. It just does the job.
Speaking about mp3s in Linux.. isn't xmms is separate from X libs or something? I've read this somewhere *sticks it in the to-do list for research*
When I spoke to System administrators (whose systems do calculation and IO) they where interested until they realized that the performance difference was mainly in interrupts and actually reduced server throughput marginally.
I am currently running this patch on the desktop linux boxes at work:
Con Kolivas - http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/
And with some testing (also at home as well before on my mini itx) and it was impressive. However, since I have been playing around with the early 2.5.56+ to 2.6. The differences is really noticable. Mplayer outputted to TV was behaving which was just what I needed along with the use of ReiserFS and a decent hdd (Maxtor 80gig 7200rpm 8mb cache).
Anyway, back on the linux boxes at work. I have spoken to a few people who were victims to the kernel upgrades (I pick them nicely ;). They all agreed that they felt the system was more responsive. This really gives me a little buzz knowing people are going to squeeze a couple of more juices out of those machines!
Blowing my trumpet here about Gentoo.. have you seen their kernel sources list?!
http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/pkgs/sys-kernel/index.xml
Okay, some of them may be a little old but hey, you get choices which is a fine thing.
New subject would be brewing.. what filesystems do you run on your servers/desktop? Reiser4 looks nice so far (But I wouldn't dare run it yet).
And what benchmark tools do you recommend for testing hdds, graphics, kernel load etc? Silly point but would this a bit useful to add to the meetings? Like persuading people to use ext2 ;)
Okay, I'm going to bed!
C