Hacking
I committed Marc-Andre‘s patch for bug #152864 today, and closed the bug, which has been open since September 2004.
It adds the required GStreamer parts to close Bug 370937 – Exessive CPU Utilisation and fix 10 wakeups per second in the volume control applet – at least when an ALSA mixer device is chosen. Other mixers still require polling, so they’ll wake up. Hopefully that will stop too as we implement poll-based notifications in the other mixer elements in GStreamer, where we can.
Does anyone know if OSS provides a select/poll based way to know when someone changes the mixer settings? Google searches haven’t been helpful. aumix at least seems to be using SIGALRM, which isn’t promising.
The Sun Audio mixerctl mentions being able to get a SIGPOLL signal sent when someone changes the mixer settings. That’s not a good interface for GStreamer (or anyone, really) to use though – anyone know if we can achieve the same thing using poll()?
Flooding
Our original plan was to drive down to Bath tomorrow and stay there for 2 nights exploring the area. With all the flooding, we’re probably not going to have much fun with that. Uraeus told me on the phone that they had a rough time on the M5, but made it to Bristol today.
At this stage, I’m inclined to try the drive anyway, but I might change my mind in the morning.