Ardour/JACK port and low-latency FreeBSD audio?

Lauri JJärvenpää Lauri.Jarvenpaa at students.turkuamk.fi
Thu Jul 24 03:22:18 PDT 2003


Hello.

Is anybody planning to port JACK and Ardour to FreeBSD?

I asked the author about the requirements on the kernel side and he
replied:
"it requires:
a) SCHED_FIFO scheduling to be fully implemented, or something equivalent.
b) at least as much of P.1003 (pthreads) to be fully and correctly
implemented as linuxthreads takes care of
c) very fast FIFOs for interprocess cooperative scheduling (this
is critical)"

I guess these do exist on FBSD but some light into subject would be nice.

And more requirements:
"JACK currently requires ALSA support to do anything useful, although
someone has written a wrapper for PortAudio for the OS-X port, and there is
also a patch to run JACK on top of a homegrown audio device driver."

Any additional ideas? How is low-latency audio usually handled in FreeBSD?

Finally, interesting sidenote:
"btw, JACK stress tests OS scheduling in a way and to a degree that no
other software does. it has revealed several problems with the linux
scheduler, and can easily cause system lockups if kernel level locking
protocols have even the tiniest weakness to them."

If nobody is alredy doing this I could try to give it a mentally challenged
shot.




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