But I like Linus's management style
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| nmset Oct 07, 2014 7:46 AM EDT |
Had he been sweet as honey, we would not have been here talking about that as the kernel would have died since long. Many would have urged their patch in for the glory of it and Linux would have looked like nothing rapidly. Keep on Linus ! Pottering wants perhaps to take the lead of the kernel developement process, perhaps pushed by some obscure figures. He may dismiss from Red Hat and work on other non-Linux related projects, he's quite a talented guy, that would clear his ambivalent approach. |
| 750 Oct 07, 2014 8:31 AM EDT |
Linus groks why unix is unix. While he called out posix time as crap, and Linux offers a improvement, it also still retains support for posix time. The basic mantra of Linus is to not disrupt user space. Poettering has basically stated that people should take a book on Linux and Unix programming and toss the section on posix. And he seems to have surrounded himself with like minded people in the development of systemd. They will put in a half-digested feature today, and then a year or two down the road rip it back out again when people have gotten used to it being there. This in contrast to Linux where a new feature may gestate in a developer source tree for years while the kinks and such are worked out. |
| jdixon Oct 07, 2014 8:34 AM EDT |
> Linus groks why unix is unix. Exactly. Poettering, otoh, doesn't have a clue in that regard. |
| Koriel Oct 07, 2014 11:07 AM EDT |
At least the kernel works more than I can say for Pulseaudio. |
| skelband Oct 07, 2014 12:55 PM EDT |
Poettering et al is addressing the areas in Linux that suck, that is certainly true and Linux audio was one particular area. The issue that people have is the implementation. PulseAudio use to be rubbish and these days is only just bearable. He has some interesting ideas, but I have a feeling that his arrogance is blinding him to any kind of criticism as to his code or his implementations and this from a person with considerable influence at Red Hat. From an outsider, this sounds distinctly like a power play which is interesting because Linus has no desires to influence anything outside of the kernel. |
| 750 Oct 07, 2014 3:05 PM EDT |
I dunno. Maybe i came into the whole debacle late (meaning that various Alsa issues have been taken care of after getting exposed by Pulseaudio shenanigans), but i have a Alsa setup here that works just fine without Pulseaudio. |
| Bob_Robertson Oct 07, 2014 3:20 PM EDT |
Agreed, 750. Alsa has worked just fine for me, too. Debian Stable uses Alsa by default, no problems at all. When Skype demanded pulse, everything broke. Skype doesn't see my USB headset any more. Can't get Pulse to give it to Skype, or to use it at all. When I change volume in VLC there is a one-second lag before the change takes effect. When I pause VLC video, when I un-pause sound does not work even though the video plays. I have to click on the time-slide-bar in order for sound to work, which of course causes the slide to change to where I click. |
| Koriel Oct 07, 2014 3:30 PM EDT |
I still have PA issues so on the 3 linux machines I have, I have removed PA from 2 of them and defaulted ALSA which works great. The other machine requires Skype to be present so it has PA on it but I had to put in a different sound card as PA was noisy with the onboard and completely useless with the TurtleBeach dedicated and is only just bearable with the SB 5.1 live dedicated. If only Skype worked with ALSA then I could kiss the entire steaming pile of turd that PA is goodbye. But enough of my whining when you can have that poor soul Poettering's whining. I just got no time for the guy and I hope Linus just ignores him as he doesn't deserve any attention which is what he is after. |
| skelband Oct 07, 2014 3:39 PM EDT |
My understanding is that ALSA doesn't support software mixing and PulseAudio was supposed to solve that problem. Lag and latency of course are the big issue here and it still hasn't really got good enough for anything important. What are people's experiences with ALSA without PA? I'm just going to be launching into audio creation on Linux since my son is interested in doing some gaming music. |
| Bob_Robertson Oct 07, 2014 3:51 PM EDT |
Alsa by itself has always worked just fine for me. |
| Koriel Oct 07, 2014 3:57 PM EDT |
My experience with ALSA is nothing but good, Im listening to music and gaming and the audio is excellent quality.
The PA software mixing thing is pointless most of the time as most modern sound cards/processors do the mixing at the hardware level anyways.
Certainly on my 3 dual core machines 2 of them using onboard audio and the other a SB5.1 I can play multiple audio streams from different sources all at the same time without skipping a beat on ALSA.
And I have never come across a soundcard that only supports software mixing if I did I would stay well clear of it. As to the supposed latency improvements with PA, I cant comment on them as latency has never been an issue for me, im just a gamer and general audio listener but folks doing serious audio work then maybe PA may make a difference but make sure you have a fast modern multicore machine as the number of bad reports I have seen of PA performance on single & dual cores makes very sad reading. Cheers |
| frankiej Oct 07, 2014 10:28 PM EDT |
My experience with ALSA on Slackware and multiple sound sources is fairly positive. However, I did run into an issue when I simply started using ogg123 to play music instead of Amarok. I would suspend the process and switch to something else and I would not get any audio (I don't recall if this was just Firefox+Flash or all other programs). After doing some research, I did have to set up my .asoundrc to use dmix as my default device and that solved the issue. But if I wasn't using ogg123 in that manner it would not have been an issue; everything worked fine together prior to that. |
| 750 Oct 08, 2014 8:29 AM EDT |
@skelband Maybe at the time (that is also what older solutions like ESD was used for). These days Alsa has dmix, a software mixer for when the hardware don't do mixing natively, enabled by default. And if you are doing sound work, i think JACK is the preferred option. |
| CFWhitman Oct 08, 2014 9:38 AM EDT |
If you're serious about sound editing, you'll probably want to dump PulseAudio and use JACK. I haven't personally had a lot of problems with PulseAudio, but then I haven't had a lot of problems without it either (I have systems with and without it). I think the most likely thing for it to help you with might be getting sound over HDMI from your laptop. I don't see where PulseAudio could possibly help with latency over no sound server (Edit: it occurred to me that it could conceivably improve it over using the dmix plug-in for software mixing through ALSA) or the JACK sound server. It seems it would be more likely to hurt latency. I'm guessing that any latency improvements are over other sound servers (like perhaps aRts or esd). |
| skelband Oct 09, 2014 1:43 PM EDT |
I'll will be playing with Jack, Ardour, FluidSynth and LMMS this weekend. Thanks for the comments. |
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