PulseAudio as a sound output?
L. Rahyen
research at science.su
Wed Oct 24 02:51:25 CDT 2007
On Monday October 8 2007 23:01, TheBlunderbuss wrote:
> L. Rahyen wrote:
> Please test with your uniprocessor and get back to us on it. Not all of us
> can have the top-of-the-line system. To all: stay away from Celerons! 128KB
> L2 isn't enough!
Sorry for a big delay in reply. In practice it is very difficult for me to
test anything on my server (because as I said it used for tasks related to
forex and therefore I only can test something on weekends; this is sometimes
is difficult too because currently I have a lot of work at weekends too
unfortunately).
I wasn't able to do full tests (compare different kernels, test all typical
situations, etc.) because of lack of time and therefore I cannot post exact
numbers to compare, sorry. But I post at least my impressions related to work
of old uniprocessor system with 2.6.23 kernel.
Well, everything is good. At least it seems to me that now everyone can
forgot about sound issues when system is under heavy load: sound is clean
even if I have a lot of working processes in background (I tested up to 10 -
that's more than enough for uniprocessor system I think). I tried processes
with and without heavy disk I/O - and sound was perfect.
However, new scheduler isn't so perfect as it may seems at first glance.
There is some issues with fairness anyway. And there is still no option to
select frequencies higher than 1 KHz in vanilla kernel (this is sometimes
useful for uniprocessor systems). I didn't run benchmarks so I cannot be sure
but I think that my 2.6.22 kernel with some patches and hacks to the
scheduler worked somewhat better, more smoothly under heavy load. Yes sound
is clean and good but some applications doesn't run as smooth as I expect
even with -20 niceness under heavy load (on my quad-core processor there is
no such problem).
Unfortunately I didn't test OpenGL (and games) in my uniprocessor system with
2.6.23 kernel because of annoying bug in NVidia driver which happens sometime
on this old machine: I have less than 1 FPS everywhere and only way to "fix"
this is to reboot the machine (or reload the driver manually but this isn't
working in all cases and require to shutdown X servers anyway). There was
Sunday and about 20:00 GMT so I simply havn't time to test farther because
after 21:00 GMT server should start its usual servicing.
But even without any benchmarking I can say that 2.6.23 contain very big
improvement in Linux scheduler. If you compare it with vanilla 2.6.22 or
older (without any hacks and modifications to the scheduler) you will see
that now many thing works perfectly even on uniprocessor system. As I have
said before SMP systems have especially noticeable improvements.
Now 2.6.23 is stable so everyone can easily try and test it. All major
distribution should provide precompiled 2.6.23 kernels in near future.
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