[PlanetCCRMA] On the Necessity of Being Root

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 01:39 -0600, Jan Depner wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 00:53 -0500, Benjamin Hardy wrote:
> > I was always running my apps as a normal user, not root. Is it still 
> > better to run Jack, Ardour, et el as root for better real time 
> > performance? 
> 
>     It's no longer necessary to run as root.  You used to have to run as
> root so you could run SCHED_FIFO to get good performance.  If you
> weren't running as root with a 2.4 kernel you weren't running real-time.

Hmm, not really. Depends on which 2.4 kernel :-) A 2.4.x kernel patched
with the capabilities patch and the use of jackstart enabled you to run
jack with SCHED_FIFO as a normal non-root user. Old 2.4.x Planet CCRMA
kernels were patched, obviously...

-- Fernando

> > I always had issues with latency but I either blamed it on 
> > my Audigy card or for using KDE (though I also had problems in XFCE). At 
> > the moment I'm back to using Windows XP to make use of my Maudio 
> > Audiophile 192 (and am pretty disappointed about the situation). I still 
> > check back in the Linux world to see what's happening.
> 
>     The easiest way to get everything set up nicely is to load FC3 and
> then use the Planet CCRMA stuff.
> 
> > Jan Depner wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 13:19 -0800, Brian Good wrote:
> > >   
> > >> Hi all,
> > >>
> > >> I've been lurking for a year now, but I've been too busy to do more than 
> > >> dabble.  I understand the
> > >> argument for doing your audio work as root, but if the net is your textbook 
> > >> the inhibition about net
> > >> surfing as root impedes study and switching  back and forth between virtual 
> > >> terminals is just too
> > >> cumbersome so I wish this stuff could be made to run by mere mortal users.
> > >
> > >     You don't have to run as root anymore but don't ask me how to set it
> > > up ;-)  I run my window manager as a normal user but I run
> > > JACK/qjackctl, Ardour, and JAMin as root.  I just have icons on my KDE
> > > desktop that run as root (it's easy to set up).  When I click one it
> > > asks me for the root password.  I trust the people who are maintaining
> > > JACK/qjackctl, Ardour, and JAMin (I would certainly hope so ;-) so I
> > > don't worry about those applications causing problems on my system.
> > > When I'm doing serious recording (8 channels for me) I'll log in using
> > > fluxbox as root - my startup script for qjackctl shuts down ALL
> > > extraneous processes, including the network so that my system is
> > > isolated.
> > >
> > >> Thank you, Fernando, for all your fine work.  And thanks to the other board 
> > >> gurus for their generous advice, which has benefited me second hand many 
> > >> times.
> > >
> > >     Second that!