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On 02/19/2012 07:24 AM, Brendan Jones wrote:
Hi all, Traditionally Fedora has been known to walk the bleeding edge in free and open source software development but for some reason this has never been realised in the realms of pro-audio/music creation. Fedora has never really attracted the support of the audio development community, and as a direct result has only flagging support from audio users, enthusiasts and professionals alike. I think there are a number of reasons for this: 1) Strict packaging and licensing guidelines, 2) relatively short release support cycles 3) the absence of an stock RT kernel 4) the effort required to tailor an installation for audio use
If I may add:5) in the past, a few decisions that broke audio related stuff in the name of progress. That drove users away (in the RedHat times and early Fedora releases, those distros plus Planet CCRMA were a very popular option that "just worked").
Distributions like Debian/Ubuntu/Arch (and others like AVLinux) have garnered strong support because they in some way address all of these issues. Fedora however... 1) and 2) we can't change. In fact at the end of the day these strengthen the distribution by making the packages we ship more robust and closer to upstream. It also demands a certain amount of love to ensure that updates/ABI bumps/breakages are dealt with decisively and swiftly. It also means that audio developers are more unlikely to maintain their own packages in Fedora (we need more maintainers) 3) I can't see happening any time soon. The kernel team maintain so many out of tree patches already that I don't think they really have the time nor desire to maintain the realtime kernel as well. I don't see this as a problem - recent kernels have incorporated much of the the rt kernel patches of old and should satisfy most users. For those with more stringent requirements can rely on the CCRMA patched kernels 4) is where I think an audio spin comes into play. If we can collate/automate all of the steps involved in setting up Fedora for audio production we will attract both users and maintainers alike alleviating the problems caused by 1 and 2.
5) we need a community that, in those cases, complains loudly so that changes that break things are reverted.
...
Apart from packaging efforts, the last few weeks for me has been an information gathering exercise. More on this soon, but briefly, the current to do list is: - pulling in all of the must have packages from CCRMA - determining the package list - packaging the Fedora Musician's guide - repackaging/patching rpmfusion packages for Fedora (qtractor and others if required) - developing sane RT priorities for the stock kernels (threadirqs) - consensus on distribution media, default desktop/supported desktops - default systemd enabled services - themes and artwork - resubmit the Spin proposal for F18
I'll be happy to help in any way I can. Minor points when compared to the above list, but here they go anyway.I believe it would be important to have a way to do the spin so that users need to do zero configuration after installation to get a working and tuned system. Most of this is possible but there are a few things that would come in handy and that I have found no solutions for (yet!):
- a better way to optimize rt priorities of relevant processes (better than rtirq)[1]
- a better way to grant SCHED_FIFO/RR scheduling classes to normal users[2]- a way to have qjackctl/jack point to the "right" card the first time jack is run[3]
- an easy way to divert PA streams to jack and back to /dev/null The first two are not easy, I think. More details below, for the curious. -- Fernando[1] rtirq is something that runs at boot time. When using threaded irqs it reorders the priority of the irq processes so that audio performance is optimized (ie: simplifying a bit, the irq of the soundcard has the highest scheduling priority, followed by jack and its clients, followed by everything else).
That does not work in a world in which soundcards come and go dynamically. The optimal solution would be to have a udev driven process that does the tuning dynamically when cards appear and disappear, and not only at boot time. I tried to do this a while back but there is a road block I was not able to overcome (something to do with finding the right irq that corresponds to a sound card).
[2] it would be best to not need to add users to a group so they are able to use rt scheduling. The Planet CCRMA solution was to let everyone use rt scheduling and has worked for me well for a very long time. It has been criticized recently for opening the workstation to potential denial of service attacks through rogue rt processes (something which is, I think, no longer even possible but, oh well).
It would be nice to be able to give rt scheduling access to the current logged in session. Granting that privilege would work for any real user of the system with no configuration and only for the time they are logged in. No more security problems, no more extra configuration steps. "Session" and "seat" experts would be needed (I tried, did not succeed).
[3] pointing to the "right card" is impossible, of course. It depends on what the user wants. But the defaults that jack and qjackctl use currently pretty much make sure the wrong choice happens if the user does nothing. Jack uses the "default" soundcard which, ahem, points to Pulse Audio if I'm not mistaken. Enough said.
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