real time OS

[Douglas Wright]

>
>No chance.  Windows cannot do this.  Linux probably can if you are
>comfortable with programming for real time applications, but you would
>probably be safest with a genuine real-time OS, which of course is a very
>specialized skill and probably expensive for the software.
>
>You kind of reach a point of diminishing returns with PC hardware.  The
>CPUs today are designed for computationally intensive applications which
>engine management is certainly not.  Your real bottleneck is the I/O,
>most PC systems are very poor at this and it's the most important part of 
>engine management.
>

Hello,

We have designed BeOS to be able to handle digital audio processing with very low latency.  We can have audio buffers as small as 1.3 msec without experiencing any dropouts or glitches.  And an incoming midi note can get from the port to a user appliction in under 100 microsecs.  As you said, PC hardware can do this, but some OSes can't.  We have fully multi-threaded environment, but with a twist.  Threads with priorities from 1-99 are on a round robin schedule with threads with a higher priority getting to run more often.  Threads with priority 100-120 are "real-time" threads.  They get to run as long as they want AND there isn't a higher priority thread running.  I would be happy to help anyone that would like to try using BeOS for doing FI management.  I would do it myself, but I've got plenty of work to do already;-)

thanks,
dug
Audio Software Engineer
Be, Inc.
http://www.be.com