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danboid
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Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

Here's an article on someones efforts towards using FreeBSD as a DAW OS.

Key quotes:

"FreeBSD doesn't have hard real-time support, but it's pretty close. For the needs of audio, FreeBSD's implementation of real-time is sufficient and, in my opinion, superior to the one you can get on Linux with RT path (which is ugly, not supported by distributions and breaks apps like VirtualBox)."

"With this setup I can play OSS, JACK and PulseAudio sound all at the same time, which I was not able to do on Linux."

http://meka.rs/blog/2017/01/25/sing-beastie-sing/
danboid
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

The article indicates using FreeBSD as a DAW right now is only for dedicated hackers willing to put the effort in. If you think Linux has a limited choice of apps and plugins then FreeBSD makes Linux look good but I welcome these advances, FreeBSD being the only open source OS that could realistically replace Linux should things go awry in Linux land.

I wish Linux's ZFS support could catch up to FreeBSD, but it may never due to licensing. Boot Environments and ZFS snapshots are how computing was meant to be. I hate it under Linux every time I pacman -Syu or dist-upgrade as it could all go wrong and if you've not took an image of your OS before you upgrade you could be spending the next few days reinstalling the lot, in some drastic cases. Boot environments fixes all that. Linux beadm needs to be integrated with GRUB if we want something like that, at least.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by gimmeapill »

As there are some resampling problems with virtual_oss, you're advised to use PulseAudio (not my favorite solution) by telling it to use virtual_oss.
Yeah, sure....

Color me not convinced.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by CrocoDuck »

Nice to see new info on this, every time a search for something I run into the usual 3 very old forum posts. Thanks for sharing!
danboid wrote:I wish Linux's ZFS support could catch up to FreeBSD, but it may never due to licensing. Boot Environments and ZFS snapshots are how computing was meant to be. I hate it under Linux every time I pacman -Syu or dist-upgrade as it could all go wrong and if you've not took an image of your OS before you upgrade you could be spending the next few days reinstalling the lot, in some drastic cases. Boot environments fixes all that. Linux beadm needs to be integrated with GRUB if we want something like that, at least.
I don't think that update is that risky on Linux, but maybe I am a lucky guy... I was wondering if maybe distributions like NixOS and GuixSD can give you something like that? Especially NixOS has the notion of bootable system states (as well as reproducible system states).
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

gimmeapill wrote:
As there are some resampling problems with virtual_oss, you're advised to use PulseAudio (not my favorite solution) by telling it to use virtual_oss.
Yeah, sure....

Color me not convinced.
virtual_oss is only required if you need more than 8 channels but yes, this is where the hackiness creeps in. Hopefully OSS will mature in this regard before FreeBSD 12.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

CrocoDuck wrote:Nice to see new info on this, every time a search for something I run into the usual 3 very old forum posts. Thanks for sharing!
danboid wrote:I wish Linux's ZFS support could catch up to FreeBSD, but it may never due to licensing. Boot Environments and ZFS snapshots are how computing was meant to be. I hate it under Linux every time I pacman -Syu or dist-upgrade as it could all go wrong and if you've not took an image of your OS before you upgrade you could be spending the next few days reinstalling the lot, in some drastic cases. Boot environments fixes all that. Linux beadm needs to be integrated with GRUB if we want something like that, at least.
I don't think that update is that risky on Linux, but maybe I am a lucky guy... I was wondering if maybe distributions like NixOS and GuixSD can give you something like that? Especially NixOS has the notion of bootable system states (as well as reproducible system states).
System upgrades are more risky on rolling distros like Arch. Arch actually does really well considering how complex the Linux ecosystem is - I upgrade my boxes at least every couple of months and MOST of the time, everything turns out fine but that hasn't always been the case. I'd much rather not have to undergo the hassle of imaging / rsyncing or whatever my OS to another drive before every update just in case. If you've never had your desktop borked after a big kernel/Qt/GTK/X/desktop upgrade and you've been a Linux user for years then I think you are lucky. I've seen all the big distros fluff major upgrades.

I've not tried NixOS or Guix yet. The main reason I use Arch vs anything else is the AUR - I want to mimimise the amount of time I spend installing software and the AUR cannot be beaten for this so I'd prefer pacman adopt some of the features of those distros if possible. A distro would need to outdo the AUR before I'll switch, or get really good ZFS support :D

I gave up on ZFS under Arch because I had to manually fix boot every time the kernel got updated. I reported the bug to the maintainer of the Arch ZFS repo but AFAIK the prob was never fixed. I wrote to him again recently and got no response hence me using FreeBSD for my server stuff.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by gimmeapill »

The main reason I use Arch vs anything else is the AUR - I want to mimimise the amount of time I spend installing software and the AUR cannot be beaten for this so I'd prefer pacman adopt some of the features of those distros if possible. A distro would need to outdo the AUR before I'll switch, or get really good ZFS support :D
I can only second you there. For a desktop, there's just nothing faster in the wild wild west than the AUR ;-)
As for ZFS on Linux being not production ready, well....still less risky than btrfs if you ask me...
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by CrocoDuck »

danboid wrote:If you've never had your desktop borked after a big kernel/Qt/GTK/X/desktop upgrade and you've been a Linux user for years then I think you are lucky.
Yep, I must be on the lucky side. I think I have been using Linux for more than 10 years now. It is the only OS I use since 2009 and I cannot remember having my system broken after an update... Still, I think I haven't been running an installation continuously for more than 3 - 4 years maximum (I end up formatting sooner for a reason or another), so maybe I actually skipped the biggest and most dangerous upgrades...

This made me curious about FreeBSD again. It would be nice to make a side-by-side audio comparison of Linux and FreeBSD... if only I had a test PC... and the time...
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by chaocrator »

why use ZFS on linux desktop at all?
on regular partitions without RAID it is significantly slower than ext4/xfs.
when one does audio production with lots of input/output, ZFS fancy snapshooting, rollback, etc. features are not THAT important.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

Its true that the real big advantages of ZFS come when you use RAIDZ, using mirrored vdevs for best performance but ZFS is still nice without RAIDZ due to checksumming, bootenvs and snapshots. Yes, these additional features do come at at a cost vs ext and XFS but less than using BTRFS and you get a stable, modern filesystem, at least under FreeBSD.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

People often make ZFS out to be this massive memory hog. Its not, so long as you don't use de-duplication, which isn't really needed or worthwhile in most cases anyway. I think the safety of my data far outweighs ZFS' extra overhead vs ext/XFS.
Last edited by danboid on Sun Apr 30, 2017 10:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by bluebell »

In the meantime someone wrote a module that enables an non-root user to start programs, e.g. jackd, with realtime priority. See https://github.com/pbiernacki/mac_rtprio

Works fine.

But the FreeBSD guys don't want ALSA, they are looking for someone who implements MIDI in OSS. So programs that rely on ALSA MIDI won't be portable to FreeBSD.

Linux – MOTU UltraLite AVB – Qtractor – http://suedwestlicht.saar.de/

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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

bluebell makes a good point - no ALSA MIDI. Don't expect to run qtractor under FreeBSD but muse should be usable via JACK MIDI. I'm more keen to try muse under FreeBSD after these recent advances.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by danboid »

The main gotchas of FreeBSD vs Linux are:

Graphics drivers are miles behind LInux, with the exception of the non-free Nvidia driver.

The GUI network management tools are crap compared to the Linux equivalents.

systemd boots infinitely faster than initv or openrc, if thats something you are bothered about.

Otherwise, FreeBSD is more 'cohesive' than any Linux distro wil ever be and the FreeBSD docs are arguably as good as or better than the Arch or Gentoo docs/wiki.
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Re: Sing, beastie, sing!

Post by chaocrator »

danboid wrote:Otherwise, FreeBSD is more 'cohesive' than any Linux distro wil ever be and the FreeBSD docs are arguably as good as or better than the Arch or Gentoo docs/wiki.
that's true, but only about the core system, not about every single piece of software available from repos and/or ports.
so, any graphical desktop environment will work in the same manner as in linux systems, and will need some tuning as in linux systems. the only BSD wit really superior GUI desktop environment right out of the box is Mac OS X )))
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