Request For Comments: Snakeoil OS 1.1.0 (Blind Testing)

[agent_kith]

Happy easter everybody. It's been a tough year 2018 in more ways than one. The pace of development for BlindTesting is not going as fast as I would like :bored:.

Having said that, development is continuing, and despite the snail's pace, it's one step closer to a beta release.

Here's a preview of what's to come: assigning processes to CPUs.

Now there are several ways to do this, for Snakeoil OS - cpuset is probably the best method because the OS is designed as a dedicated music playback machine after all.

And here's the GUI on how to set this up. Here's an example of a correct setting (OK), and an incorrect version (Error).
 

First up Snakeoil will find out the number of virtual CPU (vCPU) your computer has (in the example, there are 2 vCPUs). If your computer only has a single core, this feature will be disabled.

The list of vCPUs is shown. Check the item to dedicate it for yourself (user), unchecked will be used by the OS. On first setup half the CPUs will be dedicated for system, while the other half for everything else. Things will be a lot more useful when you have more than 2 cores. For example if you have 4 vCPUs, 2 for system, and 2 cores for music playback (or 1 for system, 3 for music).

There are also the standard basic error checkings. e.g. you cannot assign all cores to user, or all cores to system (see Error). Obviously you cannot continue when there is an error. And you can enable/disable this any time.

What's the point of this you may ask? Well, the idea is to make sure the music code don't 'jump' across different CPUs. The reason is complicated to explain, suffice to say this has a good chance of either reducing latency, or increasing it. :huh:

The only way to find out - is to test it out. The theory is, this setting may well improve some motherboards. To the extent that, perhaps someday I may finally replace my NF9C with something else ;).