Beaglebone GSoC Proposal - Real Timea Audio

Google Summer of Code
1

Dear Sirs,

I am Michele Bussolotto, an M.Sc. student in Electronic Engineer. I would like to partecipate to this edition of Google Summer of Code and I will be very glad if you could give me an opinion about a project idea.

In particular my idea is to improve actual audio driver for using Beaglebone in real-time application. I would like to know if it could be a good proposal and if there is any mentor interested in this project.

Thanks,

2

Michele,

Can you give me some more details on what you are proposing?

When you say Real Time do you mean Mixing Live or something else

Thanks

Tom

3

Thanks for replying,

What I’m thinking about is to reduce latency in audio driver. The performance of all audio applications depending on period’s dimension: having bigger periods cause less call to the CPU. If it’s desired small periods (for example when we are elaborating music signal), the load of CPU greatly increase. My target would be to optimize this driver to improve performance in this kind of application.

I hope I made myself clear.

Thanks

4

Thanks for replying,

What I’m thinking about is to reduce latency in audio driver. The performance of all audio applications depending on period’s dimension: having bigger periods cause less call to the CPU. If it’s desired small periods (for example when we are elaborating music signal), the load of CPU greatly increase. My target would be to optimize this driver to improve performance in this kind of application.

I hope I made myself clear.

Have you already done some kind of profile to convince you there are many opportunities for optimization.

5

what driver exactly are you talking about?

6

No, I don’t have experience in optimization coding. What I am thinking to do is study in deep real time problems (also during community-bonding period) and then, after I have discovered the main problem, search the most common solutions. E.g. I’ve seen that one of the first thing to improve real time performance is apply preemptive-patch, change priority to ALSA or Jack tasks etc, customize ALSA driver… I’ve founded lots of paper (on google scholar or ieeexplore) that explain how to customize an environment for real-time and low latency music.