Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:13:15 +0100 From: Benjamin Walkenhorst <krylon@gmx.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: latency Message-ID: <20040121201315.44d0f8f8.krylon@gmx.net> In-Reply-To: <1585049529.20040122002923@nm.ru> References: <1585049529.20040122002923@nm.ru>
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--Signature=_Wed__21_Jan_2004_20_13_15_+0100_L.zFzVG_AcPPT2/4 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello, On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 00:29:23 +0600 Stas <00@nm.ru> wrote: > Hello, > > How much is latency in FreeBSD? > > I would like to listen music playing on FreeBSD PC with hi-fi sound. > First I need to be sure the system latency is low enough. It depends. a) Where does the music come from? CD, MP3, WAV, MIDI? b) What kind of machine do you have? If you want to play Audio-CDs, you can often plug headphones or speakers to the front-panel of a CD-drive. Otherwise you need a sound "card", either on-board or as an add-on-card. Also, if you want to list to MP3, your machine has to be fast enough (P100 and faster, if I am not mistaken) On my machine, I listen to MP3s a lot. It's an Athlon XP 2400+ with 256MB RAM and a Soundblaster 64 or 128 PCI, running FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE: playing MP3s has almost no visible effect on system performance. The sounds gets laggy, when the system is under *really heavy* load. But I mean extremely heavy - compiling programs or rebuilding the system has no notable effect. =) Also, I store my MP3s on a second machine and share them with my desktop-machine via NFS, so if I put the network under heavy load, playback gets laggy, too, sometimes. But the network only consists of the two machines (the other one is Athlon 700 / 160 MB RAM / NetBSD 1.6.2_RC4) connected via 100Mbit-Ethernet, so this happens very rarely, too. If your machine is fast enough, and if you have a soundcard that works with FreeBSD, you should have no trouble listening to music. If you have a soundcard installed, you just need to add the line "device pcm" to your kernel-config, recompile the kernel and there you go. Now all you need is a program to play music. I use xmms (www.xmms.org, or you can install it via ports, too). Back in summer, I had FreeBSD 5.0 installed on a Pentium III 450 with 256 MB RAM, listening to MP3s was fine, too. And both machines are *far* above the minimum requirements. A Pentium 133 with 64MB RAM should be sufficient, unless you want to run "big boys" alongside (KDE, Mozilla, ...) I am not quite sure what you mean by latency, but FreeBSD is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system, so even with many things going on at the same time, music-playback works fine, if your machine is fast enough. > -- > Best regards, > Stas Kind regards, Benjamin --Signature=_Wed__21_Jan_2004_20_13_15_+0100_L.zFzVG_AcPPT2/4 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (NetBSD) iD8DBQFADs9L/JWwsvZUqOwRApqKAJ9a8QvRkktrSSdGTI4PEP7jcUuZCgCeNIzJ Pi7CXOMqvMsCXpo0d2LtgAg= =uAA5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --Signature=_Wed__21_Jan_2004_20_13_15_+0100_L.zFzVG_AcPPT2/4--
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