+1 for no userspace daemon

Posted Sep 22, 2008 22:12 UTC (Mon) by lysse (guest, #3190)
In reply to: +1 for no userspace daemon by literfizzer
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Same here... with the possible exception of jack - but even then, I can't help but wonder whether the Unix "everything is an entirely passive file" is quite the thing for audio. No problem at all with "everything is a file", but why not say "every file can be opened with either a passive interface or a stream/callback interface"? Wouldn't make much difference for files which are blocks of disk, true, which is why having both is nice - but the stream/callback paradigm is more or less perfect for pipes; after all, it's more or less how they work anyway... and since that's the model jackd presents to its applications, wouldn't the need for it would more or less go away altogether?

+1 for no userspace daemon

Posted Sep 22, 2008 23:22 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

A 'stream/callback interface' can be modelled as a pair of files, one of
which is a source of data and one a sink, or as a single file which you
can read() responses from as you write() stuff to it. Anything you can do
with a TCP/IP socket you can do with a suitably backed file, and we know
very well that you can define protocols over network sockets :)

+1 for no userspace daemon

Posted Sep 23, 2008 6:35 UTC (Tue) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

That just shows that the two models are equivalent in expressive power, like inheritance and delegation. If we couldn't synthesise one from the other, JACK couldn't exist - but it'd still be nicest of all to have both available at the lowest level :)