this is really cool, and i look forward to making use to this. (perhaps it might be time to change the name of the patch subdir from serial-midi to something else?)
thankyou so much for your diligent efforts! On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Seigo Tanimura wrote: > Hi! > > > MPU401, the most widely-used midi interface now works under > my midi driver framework. Another new thing is a fine timer > at a period of 156us, called directly from hardclock(). > > You can try the patch at: > http://www.naklab.dnj.ynu.ac.jp/~tanimura/freebsd-serialmidi/patch/ > newmidi-19990706.diff.gz > > The instruction is at: > http://www.naklab.dnj.ynu.ac.jp/~tanimura/freebsd-serialmidi/ > > > Here is the introduction of my new timer: > > Unlike 16550, MPU401 does not generate an interrupt on TX-ready. > So we have to choose one of the following two options to drive > MPU401: > > A. polling the status to wait until TX-ready, > B. emulating a TX-ready interrupt by a timer. > > The option A, used by VoxWare(sys/i386/isa/sound/sb16_midi.c:sb16midi_out()), > consumes most of syscall time to wait for MPU401 to come TX-ready. > One byte of midi message takes 0.32ms to transmit. Some certain midi > sequences contain continuous long sysexes summed up to 200 bytes or > more, leaving a latency of 0.32 * 200 = 60ms or something like that. > This latency results in an unstable tempo. > > I have chosen the option B to eliminate the latency on message > transmission. In this case, the timer needs to be capable of a period > less than 0.32ms. The conventional timeout(9) has a period of 1/hz[s], > which is generally 10ms. (hz = 100) While raising hz to, eg 3000 seems > to shorten the period of timeout(9) enough, many parts of the kernel > would be affected by this change, likely to end up with poor stability. > > To solve this problem, I propose a new *fine* callout mechanism. > The realtime clock interrupt is at (hz * (1 << hzmul))[Hz], where > (1 << hzmul) is the mutiplication ratio of hz. Although the ratio can > be any natural number in theory, I have chosen the power of two to > reduce the computational cost of the clock divider. (discussed later) > > As desceribed above, (for i386) clkintr() is called at > (hz * (1 << hzmul))[Hz], calling hardclock() at the same frequency. > hardclock() has two elements in it: a callout detector and a clock > divider. A callout detector traverses the callout list and makes > a callout, as in softclock(), except that the IPL stays at splclock. > A clock divider reduces the frequency to hz[Hz], to process the > conventional hardclock(), which is now renamed to hardclock1(), and > softclock(). Although dividing a clock tick generally involves a > costing division operation of the dividor counter by (1 << hzmul), > a ratio of 2^n allows us to replace the operation with a simple > shift of (clkdiv >> hzmul), where clkdiv is the dividor counter > incremented one by one on a hardclock(). > > Fig 1 shows the frequency and the IPL of the new timer handlers. > > > Frequency IPL > Timer ^ ^ > Generator | | > | | | > v (hz * (1 << hzmul))[Hz] splclock > clkintr() | | > | | | > v v v > hardclock() -> Fine ________________________________________ > | Callouts ^ ^ > v | | > hardclock1() | | > | hz[Hz] splsoftclock > v | | > softclock() -> Conventional | | > Callouts v v > > Fig 1: Call Frequency and IPL under New Timer Handling > > > I have implemented the new fine callout system discussed above > in the latest patch of my midi driver. hzmul is 6, to multiply the > timer frequency to 6400Hz. The usage of the fine callout is the same > as timeout(9), except for the prefix of fine-, and that the granularity > of the ticks is (1/(hz * (1 << hzmul)))[s]. Although I have not done > any quantitative evaluation yet, I played some midi sequences with > sysex messages to show a picture on the LCD of my SC-88, recognizing > no latency like VoxWare. This result states the effectiveness of my > proposing fine callout system. The future works include porting to > alpha and PC98, and tuning hzmul. > > > Whew, that was some kind of a paper to write! I would be pleased > very much if you let me know how you think of my idea. > > Thanks in advance! > > > Seigo Tanimura <tanim...@naklab.dnj.ynu.ac.jp> > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
