Yes, I won't spare you my panorama shots from my recent trip to India. After arriving in Goa Badami was our next stop. It's a very pretty little town in northern Karnataka, and here's a panorama shot from the entrance of the town's famous caves:

Next step was one of the most amazing places on earth, Hampi in central Karnataka. It is definitely one of the greatest sights I have ever seen, and I guess I can say I have seen quite a few in my life. A vast landscape of hills covered in boulders, lush mango and banana plantations, rice fields, dotted with age-old temples and impressive ruins. Locals crossing the river in coracles that look like they belong in a time centuries ago. Women washing colourful laundry in the river, pilgrims wading across the river in their black clothes. An India that delivers every bit of that promise it makes to its visitors. The ruins rival the grand sites in Greece and the landscape sometimes looks like a Crysis in-game scene.

Taken from one of the hills in Hampi this is the sunset:

And then, the next day at dawn make your way up the hills again and you can get an even greater view on the whole scenery:

That's it for today, tomorrow I'll post more panoramas, both from Hampi and other stops of our trip.

Also, if you haven't seen them yet, don't miss my panoramas from my India trip the year before.

India is a weird and beautiful country. And I am too lazy to retouch my photos.

Building on what Havoc wrote two years ago about the fallacies of OOM safety (Out Of Memory) in user code I'd like to point you to this little mail I just posted to jack-devel which tries to give you the bigger picture. Should be interesting for non-audio folks, too.

Say NO to OOM safety!

Folks! Since quite some time now the kernel exports the DMI machine information below /sys/class/dmi/id/. You may stop now parsing the output of dmidecode thus depending on external tools and privileged code.

For example, to read your BIOS vendor string all you need to do is this:

$ read bv < /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_vendor
$ echo $bv

Which is of course much simpler, and cleaner, and safer than anything involving dmidecode.

Thank you for your time!

#nocomments yes

<rant>

So in the past Ubuntu packaged PA in a way that, let's say, was not exactly optimal. I thought they'd gotten around fixing things since then. Turns out they didn't. Seems in their upcoming release they again did some genius thing to make PA on Ubuntu perform worse than it could. The Ubuntu kernel contains all kind of closed-source and other crap to no limits, but backporting a tiny patch that is blessed and merged upstream and in Fedora for ages, that they won't do. Gah.

And it doesn't stop there. This patch is an outright insult. This is disappointing.

Madness. Not good, Ubuntu, really not good! And I'll get all the complaints for this f**up again. Thanks!

/me is disappointed. Ubuntu, you really can do better than this.

</rant>

#nocomments y

Kinda fun watching this video. As it seems the big new features of the Windows 7 audio stack are the ability to move streams while they are live, to do role-based policy routing, and to pause streams during phone calls. Hah! That's so yesterday! A certain sound server I happen to know very well has been supporting this for a longer time already, and you can even buy that logic in various consumer products.

Nice to know that in some areas of the audio stack it's not us who need to play catch-up with them, but they are the ones who need to play catch-up with us.

CIO has an interview with me.

LWN covers Paul's and my talk at the Audio MC at LPC, Portland. (Subscribers only for now)

Update: Here's a free subscriber link.

Here are some very short notes from the Audio BoF at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland two weeks ago. Sorry for the delay!

Biggest issue discussed was audio routing. On embedded devices this gets more complex each day, and there are a lot of open questions on the desktop, too. Different DSP scenarios; how do mixer controls match up with PCM streams and jack sensing? How do we determine which volume control sliders that are in the pipeline we are currently interested in? How does that relate to policy decisions? Format to store audio routing in?

The ALSA scenario subsystem currently being worked on by Liam Girdwood and the folks at SlimLogic and currently on its way to being integrated into ALSA proper hopefully helps us, so that we can strip a lot of complexity related to the routing logic from PulseAudio and move it into a lower level which naturally knows more about the hardware's internal routing.

Does it make sense for some apps to bypass the ALSA userspace layer and to talk to the kernel drivers via ioctl()s directly?i (i.e. thus not depending on ALSA's LISP intepreter, and a lot of other complexities)? Probably yes, but certainly not in the short term future. Salsa? libsydney?

Should the timing deviation estimation/interpolation be moved from PulseAudio into the kernel? Might be a good idea. Particularly interesting when we try to to monitor not only the system and audio clocks, but the video output and particularly the video input (i.e. video4linux) clocks, too. A unified kernel-based timing system has advantages in accuracy, allows better handling of (pseudo-) atomic timing snapshots, and would centralize timing handling not only between different applications (PA and JACK) but also between different subsystems. Problem: current timing stuff in PulseAudio might be a bit too homegrown for moving it 1:1 into the kernel. Also, depends on FP. Needs someone to push this. Apple does the clock handling in the kernel. How does this relate to ALSA's timer API?

Seems Ubuntu is going to kill OSS pretty soon too, following Fedora's lead. Yay!

And that's all I have. Should be the biggest points raised. Ping me if I forgot something.

#nocomments yes

An often asked question is how to properly talk to PulseAudio from within applications where latency matters. To answer that question once and for all I've written this guide in our Wiki that should light things up a little. If you are interested in audio latency in PA, want to know how to minimize CPU usage and power consumption or how to maximize drop-out safety make sure to read this!