Subject: Re: [ecasound] ecasound on low-end machines
From: Kai Vehmanen (k_AT_eca.cx)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 19:08:55 EET
On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Mikko Nummelin wrote:
>> I just finished testing Ecasound (2.3.0) on my old 486SX/25Mhz/16MB,
> For these purposes, there might be good to branch another project from
> ecasound (using some of the same structures) to just be able to do
> multitrack-recording with ALSA, but nothing else. This idea of doing a
> stripped version has been done with Mozilla, resulting in Mozilla
> Firebird.
Just to be sure, Ecasound _does_ run fine even on very old 486 machines
such as the one mentioned above. The worst part is the compilation time,
but this is not a critical problem. Unlike Mozilla and OpenOffice,
Ecasound even starts up quickly! :)
One real performance issue is Ecasound's reliance on FPU arithmetic. This
becomes a serious problem when you run Ecasound on machines without a FPU
unit (PDAs, very old 386/486 machines, etc). So an fixed-point port of
Ecasound would make sense I guess.
But, but, other than that, if someone can point out clear bloat somewhere
in Ecasound, I'd rather remove it from the mainstream version altogether
than maintain a separate minimalist tree. Suggestions are welcome... :)
-- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!
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