On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 00:38:25 +0000 abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 12:16:02AM +0000, Craig wrote:
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.
I think what Owen was trying to say was that playing mp3s on a pentium 233 was very sucky, and I am not surprised to be honest :) I was wondering if he had dma enabled on his disks though, as that can be a real performance killer....
I dont think I had at the time, I have now though, and yes it does make a BIG difference.
What he says about windows is quite funny though as running linux xmms (or whatever) perhaps uses up to 1% of cpu on my Athlon XP 1700+ but in windows can use up to 80% of cpu and then start to stutter when multitasking...
Yes but I was comparing XMMS with winamp which ran on my P200MMX just fine while xmms, and mpg123 used to make a terrible noise when ever I started applications, particularly Netscape.
Although I can make xmms stutter on this machine by disabling dma on the disk and then doing some io related tasks. (well on the old disk, have not tried on the newer disk, but i believe that it would be the same)
You will also notice that X11 sorts its self out quicker (when you switch into and out of it) with the low latency and preemptive patches,
Other things will be much the same.
Regards
Owen
PS sorry for the Typo's in the previous post