On Thu, 10.04.08 09:03, Pieter Palmers (pieterp@joow.be) wrote:
I find it very strange that ALSA just switches to monotonic timestamps just like that, anyway. Programs written for wallclack timestamps will break if they run on a system where ALSA uses monotonic timestamps!
There's a function missing that enables monotonic timestamps explicitly, or at least one that can be used to query if they are monotonic or not.
The clean solution would (IMHO) be to have ALSA provide a function to obtain 'current time', thereby making the timestamp system self-contained. Maybe it already does...
This wouldn't help much since timestamps might also come from other libraries. i.e. being able to relate timestamps from ALSA with timestamps from the application itself is not enough. They also need to be relatable to timestamps from other code, which might not necessarily be linked against ALSA.
i.e. think of gstreamer that uses timestamps attached to each video frame. Do you really expect gst to move their timestamp source over to ALSA just because one of the plugins for gst supports ALSA?
Lennart