(home) recording studio - low latency audio & hardware

[Krefft, Daniel]

Hi,

I want to build my own audio recording system (mostly standard components).
Genode seems a great and highly customizable alternative to blown up operating systems <insert one of the three main os here> with some extra packages.
Also, it offers a low latency audio support on-top of alsa (good starting point).

So, the following random questions came into my mind:

1) Is the turmvilla scenario a good starting point?
2) What about the support for firewire-devices (e.g. audio interfaces)?
3) Does the e.g. Linux-kernel need to be patched to get lower latency?
4) Which PC architecture is supported (x86 & x86_64)?
5) What is the current state of the display-driver?

The general setup should be similar to this:

PC: Haswell CPU (i5, 2.6 GHz), 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, Mini ITX Formfactor
Equipment: Firewire Audio Interface
Software: Linux-Kernel or base-hw, ALSA, FFADO, JACK?, Ardour4, ...

Thank you in advance.

Best regards
Daniel


--
Daniel Krefft MSc.
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Fakultaet fuer Informatik
Lehrstuhl fuer Betriebssysteme

Arcisstrasse 21
80333 Muenchen

Tel. [phone]

***@tum.de
www.os.in.tum.de/personen/krefft

[Norman Feske]

Hi Daniel,

Post by Krefft, Daniel
I want to build my own audio recording system (mostly standard components).
Genode seems a great and highly customizable alternative to blown up operating systems <insert one of the three main os here> with some extra packages.
Also, it offers a low latency audio support on-top of alsa (good starting point).

as a note of caution, even though we have designed Genode's audio
interfaces by paying attention to low latency as requirement, we haven't
conducted real measurements and have not stressed those interfaces very
intensively so far. But I agree that the current state already provides
a nice playground.

* There are the 'Audio_in' and 'Audio_out' session interfaces, which
make it fairly easy to chain audio components.
* We have an audio driver ported from OpenBSD.
* There is an audio mixer.
* Several of the supported kernels provide hard priorities, which
is useful to guarantee the timely scheduling of audio-processing
components independent from unrelated (lower-priority) parts of
the system.

Post by Krefft, Daniel
1) Is the turmvilla scenario a good starting point?

I don't think so. It may be good for inspiration but I would recommend
you to build a scenario from scatch by including - step by step - only
those components that you actually need.

For porting existing audio software, I would create a run script for
each individual piece of software. So you can test and port each of part
independently. Once you know that each of the individual parts work, you
can integrate them into a bigger scenario.

Post by Krefft, Daniel
2) What about the support for firewire-devices (e.g. audio interfaces)?

There is no driver support for firewire yet.

Post by Krefft, Daniel
3) Does the e.g. Linux-kernel need to be patched to get lower latency?

Frankly, the Linux version of Genode is only meant as a development
vehicle. It is great during development but for an actual deployment, I
don't see the appeal of combining Genode with Linux. Have you considered
to use of NOVA? This is the kernel that we use most often on x86 right now.

Post by Krefft, Daniel
4) Which PC architecture is supported (x86 & x86_64)?

Yes.

Post by Krefft, Daniel
5) What is the current state of the display-driver?

There are two display drivers for the PC platform available on Genode, a
VESA driver (based of X.org's xf86emu) and the Intel graphics driver
ported from the Linux kernel.

Cheers
Norman