Low-Latency Audio on Linux by Means of Real-Time Scheduling ∗ Tommaso CUCINOTTA and Dario FAGGIOLI and Giacomo BAGNOLI Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa (Italy) ft.cucinotta,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract audio collections and running the proper mixing In this paper, we propose to use resource reserva- software. tions scheduling and feedback-based allocation tech- In fact, developing complex multimedia appli- niques for the provisioning of proper timeliness guar- cations on GNU/Linux allows for the exploita- antees to audio processing applications. This al- tion of a multitude of OS services (e.g., network- lows real-time audio tasks to meet the tight tim- ing), libraries (e.g., sophisticated multimedia ing constraints characterizing them, even if other in- compression libraries) and media/storage sup- teractive activities are present in the system. The port (e.g., memory cards), as well as comfort- JACK sound infrastructure has been modified, lever- able and easy-to-use programming and debug- aging the real-time scheduler present in the Adaptive ging tools. However, contrarily to a Real-Time Quality of Service Architecture (AQuoSA). The ef- Operating System (RTOS), a GPOS is not gen- fectiveness of the proposed approach, which does not erally designed to provide scheduling guarantees require any modifiction to existing JACK clients, is to the running applications. This is why either validated through extensive experiments under dif- large amount of buffering is very likely to oc- ferent load conditions. cur, with an unavoidable impact on response time and latencies, or the POSIX fixed-priority Keywords (e.g., SCHED FIFO) real-time scheduling is uti- JACK, real-time, scheduling, time-sensitive, re- lized, but this turns out to be difficult when source reservation there is more than one time-sensitive applica- tion in the system.