Re: desktop and multimedia as an afterthought?

[Paul Davis <paul@linuxaudiosystems.com>]

>It's too bad that the multimedia community didn't participate
>much during the 2.5.xx development leading up to 2.6.0. If they
>had done so, the situation might be different today. Fortunately,
>fixing up the multimedia problems isn't too risky to do during
>the stable 2.6.xx series.

I regret that this description is persisting here. "We" (the audio
developer community) did not participate because it was made clear
that our needs were not going to be considered. We were told that the
preemption patch was sufficient to provide "low latency", and that
rescheduling points dotted all over the place was bad engineering
(probably true). With this as the pre-rendered verdict, there's not a
lot of point in dedicating time to tracking a situation that clearly
is not going to work.

The kernel is not going to provide adequate latency for multimedia
needs without either (1) latency issues being front and center in
every kernel developer's mind, which seems unlikely and/or (2)
conditional rescheduling points added to the kernel, which appears to
require non-mainstreamed patches.

--p