Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [alsa-devel] Re: [rtl] Low-latency patches working GREAT (<2.9ms audio latency), see testresults ,but ISDN troubles | Date | Sun, 29 Aug 1999 03:34:41 -0400 | From | Paul Barton-Davis <> |
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Linus wrote:
>Guys, if anybody thinks we're competing with BeOS, then wake up. BeOS is a
last i heard, we weren't "competing" with anyone. we were trying to write a really really good OS.
BeOS is unique in that its the first vaguely stable OS to be designed with multimedia in mind from the ground up. there are those of us who see computing technology as either currently or very soon delivering the power to do things with audio and video that have been hard to do without special purpose hardware as little as two years ago. right now, linux is not the right platform for doing this, and BeOS is, and I don't like that.
there is persistent denial on l-k and elsewhere that an OS designed to effectively support "traditional" computer usage (compilation, number crunching, data serving) has any fundamental differences from one based around, say, real-time audio generation & manipulation.
i doubt that this is true, but burying our heads in the sand won't change the answer one way or another. i personally suspect that the only reason BeOS has a niche *at all* is (1) because its true that there is a difference and (2) because there are companies out there who would like to develop for something better than Win/Mac and are scared to do the linux^H^H^H^H^Hright thing.
it would be very nice to be able to compile linux with options that say, in essence: "this is a mostly single-user box with little or no network use, not much disk I/O that really benefits from a smart filesystem, and regular use of soft-real-time tasks that want to take over the machine if at all possible."
this is a profile that has a very different emphasis from many of the things that kernel folks are working on supporting. to dismiss this kind of system as a "niche" is to potentially miss a broad wave in computing usage over the next decade or so. IMHO.
>niche OS that isn't worth competing against, and at most we can try to >find out what it's good at and see if we can emulate some of it. But 25%
"emulate" ? i'd rather we copy it and/or do it better.
>disk IO decrease is definitely not something we want to even consider.
oh come on linus - nobody has gotten close to suggesting that its an acceptable change! benno was merely observing the current status of things. i strongly suspect that victor's "tunable parameter" suggestion could solve quite a bit of the difference.
--p
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