
Linux.FR has an
interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."
Member since:
2010-03-08
Yep, I probably was tired when I read the sentence the first time, because I read it as "using (broken ?) sound card timer irqs" the first time, whereas now I read it as "using system timer irqs, using timer information provided by the sound card".
I'd like to point out that they could do without the sound card's timer information though, if it was broken, as long as they had sound card IRQ support :
1/Enable sound card IRQ
2/Measure sound care IRQ frequency using ultra high-resolution APIC timer (~.1 MHz audio clock vs an APIC clock that runs at hundreds of MHz = negligible aliasing)
3/Disable sound card IRQ and never enable it again
An ugly measurement is better than unreliable information
Edited 2011-07-08 10:00 UTC