Question about kernel for BBB

Hi,
I recently bought a BeagleBone Black in preference to a Raspberry Pi (because of better hardware specs, processor more widely supported, better access to hardware I/O etc.).

Anyway, I’d like to use it for audio processing, especially in light of finding out about the ‘Satellite’ project at CCRMA. At the moment, the BBB is not supported by the Satellite group, but I’d like to think it isn’t too hard to knock up a comparable image :slight_smile:

Anyway, I asked a question in the Satellite group about the packages included in Satellite, and received the following helpful info:

… even if you do this from the stock BBB Ubuntu release, you will still be missing the low-latency kernel switches for audio (you would need to recompile the kernel), and you would be missing the feature to disable flash writes to preserve the lifespan of the memory (see this paper https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~eberdahl/Papers/NIME2013SatelliteCCRMA.pdf).

My questions are:

  1. how straightforward is it to get/build a Ubuntu kernel with the low-latency kernel patch (I’ve used that before, but on a desktop machine where I simply downloaded a prebuilt kernel)
  2. How big a problem is flash wear (or is that already covered in the BBB kernel builds?)

Thanks!

john…

The folks at OSADL were looking at A8 patches for real time, but I don’t know the latest state. I am not too familiar with Xenomai, but it would be interesting to hear if it does anything to the latency. You can get a Xenomai patched kernel and system using Ubuntu from MachineKit.