Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Distorted playback of real-time audio on Linux

[Elvis Dowson]

Hi Eric,

On Aug 13, 2010, at 8:38 PM, Eric Blossom wrote:

> Given the interfaces exported by ALSA, you'd need to figure out how to
> honor the condition "ok_to_block == False".

Could you please tell me the intent behind the ok_to_block flag? 

By blocking, do you mean a synchronous call, which will block and render the 
subsystem un-responsive, until, it completes? 

In this scenario, should the two subsystems be running asynchronously, with a 
buffer in between, so that the two can run at different clock rates? e.g. USRP2 
running at a particular clock rate, and the alsa_audio_sink running at a 
different clock rate? 

Or is the whole GNU Radio flow-graph a synchronous system, i.e. it completes 
execution and evaluation of the entire flow graph, every clock cycle, reading 
data from the environment, processing the inputs, and computing the output, for 
every clock cycle?

Best regards,

Elvis Dowson