[alsa-devel] Alsa timing question

[Olivier Guillion - Myriad]

Hi,

Raymond Toy <rtoy at google.com> wrote :
> > IMO, it's not a good idea to try to synchronize perfectly two processes by way
> > of an interrupt. If the generating process has to remain untouched, you should
> > probably bufferize its data in your own process before sending it to writei.
> > It would add some latency, but make the data flow safer. Here is how it could
> > work: 1- Your process writes a "magic" pattern at the end of the shared area
> > 2- It sends a signal to the other process to make it generate data 3- It
> > checks whether the magic pattern is still here 4- When changed, it means the
> > data have been calculated. It saves them to an internal circular buffer
> >
> 
> A nice idea, but I'm not sure it will work in my scenario.  The "magic"
> pattern could potentially be real data (the buffer contains audio samples), so
> that would cause funny, hard-to-reproduce glitches. 

You are theorically right, even if I doubt that much genuine audio buffer could 
end with, let's say : 0x8000 0x7FFF followed by "This is magic!!!" string :)

>  Plus, I think that when I
> request new data, something is always written.

I thought it was asynchronous, and you just send a signal to your generating 
process to ask it generate data.

> Clemens idea of a counter at the beginning of the buffer would work nicely, but
> requires changes in the generating process.

Right. But if you can modify  the generating process and recompile it, there is 
no more problem. Can you?

Olivier