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Originally Posted by Klangfarben
I also wanted to thank you for such great information and for the work you are putting in. I had a couple questions if you have the time to answer.
First, I know you are only about a month into this, but from what you've done so far and been able to accomplish, what would you say the prognosis is for getting similar/on par performance with Kontakt on Windows in Linux?
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Well, I'm a month in -- but with prior dealing with these sorts of issues with wine / proaudio.
My own expectation is to dramatically improve performance in Wine, and yes, for Kontakt too. As to whether or not it's possible to achieve Windows level performance? I would say that's unlikely. The reasons for that are complicated - after all, we are running this software in a non-native environment and we don't have NT kernel. Wine can't do things like wait-on-multiple-objects - that would require that Wineserver was multi-threaded. So there are technical challenges here. some are not easy to solve (far beyond my abilities).
regardless of that, it's still possible to get reasonable performance. I think once I get the threading / priorities all worked out (i kind of had a breakthrough, lastnight. but still a few todo's), then I can move onto other things; like setting priorities from within ntdll, rather than wineserver (which causes xruns, afaict)... and i can start looking at other optimizations - like moving certain calls out of wineserver (that hurt performance) and other things... So i believe that there is lots of room for performance improvements.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Klangfarben
Second, I'm using Manjaro. Obviously not the same as Arch, but does have full access to the AUR. Once you have this in a semi-ready for public consumption state, do you have any plans to put this up on AUR or are you just going to stick to your github?
Again, thanks so much for what you are doing. I know you pretty much consider this a hack right now, but for those of us trying to migrate over to Linux full time, this is a really big deal. A lot of plugins I can live without but there just isn't a replacement for Kontakt and the library content.
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Yeah, i very well might maintain packages on the AUR (I used to maintain AUR packages, for several years; custom kernel packages, nvidia driver and some other RT related goodies from RedHat)... But that would be after I feel that I've gotten things to where I want to, at least in terms of more broad consumption... Currently, I'm still experimenting, so it's not there yet / for AUR...
Yes, it's a series of hacks - as I slowly pull together something viable. I'm making fairly steady progress though. But there is a steep learning curve to much of what I am working on... and as someone who is not a software engineer - that makes it even harder, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Thankfully, a couple of folks from codeweavers have been helpful (devs I've contacted about their code, that I'm modified, or used parts of) and if I get into a pinch -- the wine-devel mailing list has always been a friendly place for me. help is usually pretty good. lots of talented software engineers lurk on that list, even if not upstream wine developers.
and yes, I can't live without Kontakt, either. or NI stuff, in general. Aside from AAS Lounge Lizard EP-4 (best electric piano VST, imho), I use NI almost exclusively. hence why I am hacking wine. lol... so yes, i understand where you are coming from.
as an aside, after a few year hiatus from this kind of thing - i find it both hilarious and sad that so many linuxaudio devs have put so much work into VST bridges and integration with Wine -- yet none have bothered with trying to fix the real problems with wine's performance. it's crazy. i don't get it.