Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Tobin Davis]

> > >  * Our ARM team says that the current versions still work rather
> > >    poorly on ARM.
> > 
> > I saw one bug about that, also mentioned in my previous post, which
> > is being worked on, but that's about it. What other issues are there?
> 
> This needs input from the ARM team, I CC'ed some of them.


I am seeing the same banshee issue on all supported arm
platforms here (BeagleXM, iMX53 Quickstart, Pandaboard, Toshiba AC100).
This is with a fresh Oneiric (11.10) install. I have yet to root cause
the issue, but I have a workaround available as a patch attached to bug
857299.  I have personally spent several weeks trying to debug this
further.  The fact that others can get it working on android or on some
system not supported here doesn't surprise me.  I might be able to get
it working if I do an upgrade from Natty->Oneiric if I mess around with
it long enough.

I also keep hearing that people are having problems getting arm
platforms to work with.  Do we need to provide a list of where to buy
supported systems?  They are very affordable (I personally have bought 2
omap4 pandaboards, 1 imx53 quickstart, and 1 omap3 beagle this year).  I
also own a Nook Color, and will be buying a Nook Tablet when they start
shipping.  And I don't get reimbursed for these (by choice - just to be
clear).

Last cycle, the issue with banshee on arm was specific to Panda and mono
in that the mono that shipped didn't support SMP on Arm:

  /* SWP on ARM is very similar to XCHG on x86.  Doesn't lock the
   * bus because there are no SMP ARM machines.  If/when there are,
   * this code will likely need to be updated. */

This took several weeks to try and fix.  In the end, we disabled
multi-threading on arm.  The result was that banshee ran, but slower
than sap in January (July for you southern hemisphere folk).

This cycle, 12.04, we are pushing out our first LTS on arm.  And it may
very well be based on enabling hard-float which has not been enabled
before.  Mono is severely broken in Debian with their hard float
implementation.  I have little doubt we will see similar issues.

Whatever the final decision is, I will do my best to test it on all
supported platforms.  Just know that banshee easily takes 1/3 of all of
my time on arm desktop, especially when there is a problem and I have to
root cause the issue.

Tobin Davis
QA Tester
Ubuntu Arm team