Help needed in rec.audio.pro 4163

The first may or may not be true, but 6 years later the second still isn't.

If you strip down your system and only run a few audio programs at once you MIGHT be able to do some audio work without xruns if you don't have the realtime stuff working. In really bad situations I have had xruns up to 900 ms without running jackd realtime. That is some serious and debilitating latency for real audio work. Just using xmms with jackd and trying to browse the web is irritating without realtime support; sort of like trying to listen to a high bandwidth net station with a 56k. (going straight to alsa is of course a different matter)

However, once setting up the realtime stuff in the kernel and such, and running jackd as realtime, I get very few minor xruns that are not even humanly noticable when I do something stupid like try to compile something more intense than the kernel while recording my guitar playing. As long as I keep moderately intelligent I can do a whole LOT of stuff at the same time and not get a single xrun.

My system is fairly state of the art as far as processing and RAM go so I really doubt running without realtime is ever going to be an option for serious audio application. Very soon though I suspect the user won't have to do much of anything to have a realtime OS with the audio stuff running as standard users in realtime. The latest kernel has this poo built in, the only thing left is for PAM to follow suit. Then if audio distributions edit limits.conf for you then you don't have to do poo to have a realtime DAW. Regardless if they do, limits.conf is an easy edit, logout, login and bam.