Re: planetCCRMA port

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 08:50, Justin H Haynes wrote:
> I want to see planetCCRMA (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma) work 
> on SPARC hardware.  Aurora LINUX appears to be the only distro that is 
> based on RedHat.  I wonder what I need to do to make this happen, so I'm 
> in the very preliminary stages.  An email to aurora-sparc-devel seemed 
> to be the best place to start.

Great idea, it also might help finding bugs in the aurora distribution. 

> My guinea pig will be an Ultra 2 with 2x200MHz procs.  I see that it has 
> a CS4231 sound chip and that it supports full duplex at 16 bit up to 
> 48000hz.  I know alsa supports this ( http://tinyurl.com/6lpfy).  I hope 
> having an SBUS machine won't be a complication.

I haven't managed to get sound on 1.91 to work (yet :) on my ultra 30
(pci instead of sbus, but sound is the same I think).

> I only see one mention in the archives of alsa ( 
> http://lists.auroralinux.org/mailman/htdig/aurora-sparc-devel/2004-June/000219.html).  
> I don't see mention of jackd.

Alsa is the default sound driver for 2.6 kernels, jackd is only used for
heavy audio applications.

> I run into complications.  I am leaning toward 1.91 since it is newer.  
> FC1 is used with alsa more than 7.3 is so there would be more interest 
> in the planetCCRMA project there. (they don't seem to interested yet, 
> though Fernando the project lead did ask me why I wanted to do this.  I 
> will answer him when I have more to say, but really I'm  just doing it 
> for the hell of it.)

Suns are not geared toward audio processing (onboard sound is only for
bleeping), but if you have a recent sparc with linux you should be able
to use about any pci sound card with portable linux drivers.
It's certainly easier to just use a pc ;)

> I am leaning toward 1.91.  From your experience, what reasons would I 
> *not* want to go with 1.91?  Is it relatively stable?  is it usable 
> yet?  Does it matter?  why?  etc.

Well, except for sound not working which should be fixable there's no
reason to go with an outdated version. It's certainly usable.

> Generally I guess this would make sense for me to start with:
> 
> - install aurora
> - install apt, add appropriate rpm sources for sparc if anyone maintains 
> such a thing.  If not leave the binaries alone, and just add the rpm-src 
> from planetCCRMA and get all the source
> - set to work on getting their kernel and alsa to compile and run.  (I 
> hope the patches work on SPARC)

I guess the general low-latency strategies will also work on sparc.
Don't know if sparc architecture has any special latency issues on
linux.

> - compile jackd
> - if all that works I'll be happy.  From there, I guess I would want 
> ardour next.  beyond that  I would hope to generate enough interest that 
> the people who want the other 100+ packages would chip in.

You could be the first one to compile ardour on sparc; if it's not yet
endian-clean you can expect to make a lot of fixes...

> - generate rpms when I see that much actually working and make them 
> available both to the aurora linux community of course, and also through 
> an apt repository to stay consistant with CCRMA.

Keep this list informed ;)

groet,
Klaasjan


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