Re: Yet another low latency patch

From: Andrew Morton (andrewm@uow.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 12 2000 - 21:55:49 EDT

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    Benno Senoner wrote:
    >
    > On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Andrew Morton wrote:
    >
    > >
    > > - Benno's `latencytest' tool is odd. It claims that it sees ~30
    > > millisecond scheduling bumps. Same with Ingo's patch. It is not
    > > obvious what is going on here. When his background workload is run
    > > against `amlat' everything is fine.
    >
    > What does mean "odd" ?
    > These 30msec are for REAL, believe me !

    Yes, it's obvious that more work is needed here. We can't offer these
    patches as "solutions" with outstanding mysteries like this.

    I modified `amlat' so that after every SIGIO it chews 80% of an interrupt
    interval. My approach was to just spin on the value of the TSC. According
    to `ps' it is amazingly accurate. Could you please take a look and let me
    know if you can spot anything which can explain this?
    http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/amlat.tar.gz

    > Andrew, if you think that my tool is flawed, then write a little app which
    > opens the audio device with 3x256 buffers ( = 4.4msec buffersize),
    > read a wav into mem, call mlockall() and then play simply from ram
    > eg:
    > ( buffer[] contains the wave (array of shorts))
    > offset=0;
    > while(1) {
    > write(audio_fd, &buffer[offset], 256);
    > offset += 256;
    > }
    >
    > excatly when latencytest registers greater than 4.4msec peaks you will hear
    > crackles, skips and pops.

    OK, I'll take a look, work out what's going on.

    -
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