Raghavan: PulseAudio vs. AudioFlinger: Fight!

On his blog, Arun Raghavan reports on comparing the performance of PulseAudio vs. Android's AudioFlinger, running them both on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone under Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). He compares CPU, memory, power usage, latency, and the features offered by both, and PulseAudio fares quite well. "For future work, it would be interesting to write a wrapper on top of PulseAudio that exposes the AudioFlinger audio and policy APIs — this would basically let us run PulseAudio as a drop-in AudioFlinger replacement. In addition, there are potential performance benefits that can be derived from using Android-specific infrastructure such as Binder (for IPC) and ashmem (for transferring audio blocks as shared memory segments, something we support on desktops using the standard Linux SHM mechanism which is not available on Android)."

Comments (28 posted)