UbuntuStudio controls redesign

[Brian David]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Fritz Meissner <meissner.fritz at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 30 March 2010 06:17, Brian David <beejunk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Fritz Meissner <
> meissner.fritz at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Secondly, I have recently seen rather exasperated comments (from
> >> someone that I respect as an authority) that the mystique surrounding
> >> "nice" settings is misplaced and that it has virtually nothing to do
> >> with audio performance. If this is the case, then should that setting
> >> not be removed from the Controls ?
>
> >
> > I'd be interested to hear these comments, because from my understanding,
> > niceness has a lot to do with audio performance.  Or, more generally, it
> has
> > a lot to with the performance of any process.  By setting the niceness of
> > programs run by users in the Audio group to -19, you are letting the
> kernel
> > know that those programs take precedence over most others when deciding
> how
> > to allocate CPU resources.  How would this not help performance?  If this
> is
> > misguided, then it would definitely be good to know.
> >
> > --
> > -Brian David
> >
>
> Brian,
>
> The comments I was remembering are in the following two posts on the
> Linux Audio User mailing list :
>
>
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2009-November/064820.html
>
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2009-November/064828.html
>
> I don't have the expertise to evaluate them, but there are enough
> knowledgeable people on LAU that I would have expected the comments to
> be shot down if they were out of line (they weren't).
>
> I noticed in those posts that they regard rtprio as the critical
> setting - should this be included in Studio Controls ?
>
> Fritz
>
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Hard to argue with Paul Davis. :)

Okay, so it's good to hear that Studio Control should eventually be able to
configure the rtprio settings.  Something that I am always needing to do on
my Ubuntu Studio systems is manually setting the priorities of certain
real-time threads (as described on this page:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Low_latency_howto, down at the
Thread Priorities section.  Coincidentally one of the many pages that
suggests adjusting the nice settings).  Without doing this, I get an
unusable amount of x-runs with the rt-kernel, and it works wonderfully after
they are set.  Can Ubuntu Studio Controls be made to set these thread
priorities?  That would be lovely.

-- 
-Brian David
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