linuxrealtime.txt

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		    LINUX REALTIME AUDIO PLAYBACK

			   Thomas M. Sailer
			[e-mail]

Typical Unix schedulers go to great lengths to allow batch processing jobs
to run on a machine while still providing interactivity. They do it by
enhancing the priority of short bursty tasks. While this works well for
many important tasks (such as X, xterm and compiling new kernel releases :-)),
it does not fit the behaviour of a MPEG player. The tasks of a MPEG player
have a "soft" deadline; if it is not met, no nuclear power plant blows up,
but still it can be heard as an annoying artifact. That's what the POSIX.1b
realtime scheduling extensions promise to remedy.

rtbuf.c is an implementation of a buffering scheme using the POSIX realtime
features. Its aim is to provide smooth playback of MPEG audio streams
even on a very heavily loaded machine. It uses many advanced features
of the operating system:
- System V shared memory
- POSIX.1b realtime scheduling extensions
- POSIX.1b memory locking
- Sound Driver DMA buffer mapping into the user proces space
Make sure that you have enabled these features! The downside
of these features is that they can only be used if the process has
root permissions. Using realtime features is somewhat dangerous, since
a realtime process can eat all the CPU time, rendering the machine
unresponsive. So don't try this on your server!

This implementation creates three processes:
- The command line parse/control process. It runs continuously as root.
- The MPEG decode/playback process. It revokes root rights as soon as it
  has enabled the realtime features, to minimize the risk for a security
  hole
- The prefetch process. Its only purpose is to load the input file into
  a memory region shared with the decode process. It also revokes root
  rights.

The MPEG decode process writes its output data directly into the soundcard
DMA buffer, which is mmap'ed into process memory. This minimizes operating
system overhead.


To use this:
Type 
./configure --enable-realtime
make
chown root.root amp
chmod u+s amp

This buffering only works on Linux (maybe also on FreeBSD, but I don't
know...) Other operating systems do not (yet) support the required
features.

A warning: The buffering might not work on an SMP system. This could
be solved by making the macros atomic_set and atomic_read SMP safe.

Have fun

Tom