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Putting this into the kernel won't solve anything that isn't already solved with things like the Linux realtime patch. The way this works is that the applications themselves need to have a realtime thread to fill their buffer, and the audio daemon has to be able to schedule them at the right time, so it's not just the daemon that needs to have special treatment from the scheduler.

Also keep in mind that these audio daemons work as an IPC to route sound between applications and over the network, not just to audio hardware. Even if you put a new API in the kernel that did the graph processing and routing there, you would still likely need a daemon for all the other things.




It would solve the needless IPC, cache trashing, priority scheduling (since it becomes a kernel thread, instead of a userspace thread), and other busywork.


Would it? Linux does support realtime priority scheduling, JACK has worked this way for years. The thing is you need userspace realtime threads for because that is what the clients need to use, it's not enough to change just the mixing thread into a kernel thread.




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