[BUGS] how to build a strong mulitmedia workstation

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Jonathan,

On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:45:41 +1000
jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:

>    i have a question to ask on behalf of a friend, he is competent in unix (the
>    one that was called isc v4 and teh whateverits called now, was sco v5ish, as
>    well as a smattering of (linux toys, his words) and vms development stufff).

Sounds properly 'old-school'...

>    the question that i was asked revolved around setting up  'the freebsd kernel
>    on a multi cpu powerpc box' .. i wasn't sure if he was asking about
>    tiger/leopard on a apple g5 box or building a freebsd powerpc box ??

I know that there is work going on with FreeBSD on PowerPC, but
it's not a tier-1 platform, so I suspect that it's experimental,
for embedded targets.  It would seem that this is likely to
remain the case, now that only IBM makes new machines with
PowerPC processors in them.

>    also, i'm looking at doing much the same thing, that is to setup a multimedia
>    desktop and as far as i can see that means going to apple software but i am not
>    sure what kind of hardware to run underneath

If you go for Apple software, that means you'll need Apple
hardware.  Well, you can run open-source Darwin on a regular PC,
I think, but that's not giving you most of the "multimedia" that
you'll be looking for.  If you're after Tiger or Leopard on
PowerPC hardware, then you will be looking for second hand
hardware.

>    is anybody here (in bugs) using apple ahrdware freebsd based tiger/leopard in a
>    more or less deadline based environments ?? muchcly appreciated by yours treuly
>    and a mr mark...

I've been using Apple laptops for a couple of years, now.  I've
run my own real-time (audio) code on it without problems.  It's
solid as a rock, and I had no trouble getting processing
latencies of a few milliseconds.  Since most "multi-media"
applications only need ten or 20ms hardness of real-time, they
should be no problem.  I've watched a couple of DVDs, and played
some CDs, but neither of those are particularly taxing chores,
and Windows does that job more or less as well.

>    i suppose that i am asking are they as good as they are claimed to ne

For multi-media, you want drivers for your multi-media hardware.
While there are a few options in that regard for FreeBSD, there
are many sharp edges, and many missing pieces.  There's a good
chance that this situation will continue to improve, as Intel,
AMD and VIA have all promised to play nicely with open-source
drivers (but not Nvidia), and there seems to be some indication
that that is happening.  On the other hand, a Mac already has
well tuned drivers for its built-in hardware, third-party
hardware add-on suppliers of things like professional audio
hardware tend to provide MacOS drivers.  Things like TV
tuner USB dongles exist for Macs, and "just work".  I
believe that things like MythTV can be made to work on
FreeBSD, but I don't know what the hardware constraints
are.  Lastly, there seems to be some chance that the Mach "IOKit"
framework underpinning OS-X might have better real-time chops
than the essentially traditional Unix scheduler in FreeBSD, but
I've not proven that. I *have* had some significant real-time
troubles with FreeBSD-7 and SCHED_ULE (reported in the FreeBSD
mailing lists), but SCHED_4BSD still works beautifully for my
personal audio processing hackery.

In summary: yes, the Apple kit is every bit as good as it's
claimed to be, IMO YMMV.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew