[Jack-Devel] JACK on mobile

Hi,

Recently there have been discussions about the viability of getting
official JACK support into the mobile audio stack. Currently JACK is left
out of the mix and Pulse Audio is the default audio system layer.

For most consumer mobile use cases this is not a problem but when it comes
to professional audio and some specific cases with very hard time limits
for the audio graph JACK can actually be preferable over the PA API and
logic.

A few things have been identified that make it hard to just drop JACK into
the mobile audio stack at this point.

1: Bluetooth support especially for hands free audio
2: "Murphy" system daemon support
3: Dealing gracefully with apps that use the PA api

On the PA mailing list we have identified several optimisations that can
be done to PA that would allow PA and JACK to coexist peacefully and cause
minimal system disruption from the developer/user perspective.

However, they are mostly required to allow JACK to run and that is not a
core priority for the PA developers. On the other hand it seems that JACK
developers are not going to be interested in spending time on optimising
PA.

So this leads to a slight issue. Is it likely that JACK will be able to
support both the Bluez and Murphy API's in order to be a drop in
replacement for PA while it is running on a mobile OS? Or is it better to
put the time into optimising PA so that we don't have to double up on
development efforts considering that the PA developers already provide
Bluez and Murphy support and are funded to work on that part of the audio
layer?

The optimisations that would enable PA to work better with JACK are not
trivial and will require some pretty heavy thought and a fair sized chunk
of time commitment to make them happen.

Its possible that we could get some assistance from the Linux Foundation
for the development process if we have a good plan and they agree that it
is an important project. In addition several of the PA developers work at
Intel and Ubuntu so there might be some support from those areas to
provide a fully professional and highly optimised audio stack for Linux
based mobile OS's.



--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd

1381865255.3638_0.ltw:2, <50454.86.127.135.155.1381865245.squirrel at boosthardware dot com>