On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 16:21, Antonio Vargas wrote: > On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 02:00:09AM +0200, Ian Kumlien wrote: > > Yes, But... When you come from AmigaOS, and have used Executive... > > things like this is dis concerning. Executive is a scheduler addition > > for amigaos that has many schedulers to choose from. One of which is the > > original feedback scheduler. While a feedback scheduler consumes some > > cpu it still allows you to play mp3's while surfing the net on a 50 mhz > > 68060. Hearing about 500mhz machines that skip is somewhat.. odd. > > Ian, I came from Amiga to Linux many moons ago, and their target are > very different... on Amiga, the mouse pointer is drawn as a hardware > sprite (same as an C64 or an arcade machine), and the mouse > movement counters are handled in hardware too, so your mouse pointer > can't _EVER_ get laggy. I also joined linux a long time ago... but the hardware pointer is not the issue. I'm more referring to using cpublit and dragging the scrollbar in a window... Like f.ex. Voyager. (And, in this case, 50Mhz is the limitation not the scheduler. With 10 times that power i bet you could do it all with the cpu, just like a common pc today.) > The sound system is very different, on Amiga you ask the system to > callback to you when audio needs replenishing, and anyways you could > boost the player priority so that multichanel or mp3 playing gets more > priority than other tasks. I can recall playing mp3 on a 68030/50 > and having to boost the player's priority so that it would get no > skipping. As you probably know 68060 machines, even if at the same mhz, > have about 8x raw calculation power. Eh, a 060 struggles with a mp3, it consumes most of the cpu and it can still render a browser window (not as fast as it could originally, but thats not my point). > So, I also feel very bad about linux when my audio skips on my 900mhz > machine and I see reports that it does the same on 2400mhz ones, but I > can understand that the general design and target is not the same... > Amiga was _designed_, both software and hardware wise, for realtime > while Unix and thus Linux is designed for multiuser timesharing. AmigaOS is lowlatency but not realtime. And, with executive you run a unix scheduler (feedback). > All that said, having a mp3 decoder as a kernel module reading from > mlocked ram would a great way to have Amiga-like music replaying ;) Hummm, Last time i played a mp3 on my amiga i kinda decoded it in the delfina dsp =) (to bad noone has done that for emu10k1... ) > Geert, perhaps you could tell us how linux music playing feels > for a desktop m68k machine? > > [ I'm CCing you since you are the only one from the m68k port > which I can see posting on a regular basis.] > > > And afair it has no real interactivity estimator. > > > > (If you are interested you can always search for Executive on aminet.. > > It has several scheduler policies including those that work great on > > small machines (25mhz or so)) > If the user or a program decided so, it could _always_ change a task > priority to upper or lower levels, which is what I did to my mp3 player > to avoid skips on my under powered machine (mp3 playing used 85%cpu) ;). Heh, what cpu? But a task raising it's cpu on it's own can be a pain since it could dominate the machine on non executive running machines. > "Executive" was an application which patched the Amiga scheduler and > hooked up a priority manager. By altering task' priorities, it managed > to get the standard round-robin scheduler to behave like a feedback one. > (Executive was _G_R_E_A_T_ :))) Executive implements dynamic priorities in a fixed priority OS, ie nice. You select the range it should use to catch processes and where it should place em. And, Executive is still great even though i haven't used it for quite some time. > Executive was configured to never touch tasks with elevated priorities, > so in fact all user tasks would get the feedback scheduler but system > drivers such as keyboard input system would continue running as realtime > round-robin. Hummm, input.device would never consume so much cpu that it would need to be penalized. > > imho, that shouldn't really be needed... =P > > (although executive apparently had a pri boost for active window... I > > doubt that i ran with it though... Been a while =)) > > Yes, it added +1 to the task which owner the active window > (this is also used in Windows if I recall correctly). But even without > this "hack", both executive-enabled and standard systems ran great. Give priority to "front most" program is in Windows and OS/2. I disabled it in OS/2 Warp something on a p120 and watched it crawl =P. -- Ian Kumlien