Orca, Speech-dispatcher and power management

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "Samuel" == Samuel Thibault <sthibault at debian.org> writes:

    Samuel> Sam Hartman, on sam. 06 janv. 2018 07:36:25 -0500, wrote:
    >> >>>>> "Samuel" == Samuel Thibault <sthibault at debian.org> writes:
    >> 
    Samuel> Hello,
    Samuel> Sam Hartman, on sam. 06 janv. 2018 06:09:44 -0500, wrote:
    >> >> * Will limiting the number of streams speech-dispatcher opens
    >> >> have any significant improvement.  Are there actual costs to
    >> >> having the sd_generic and sd_dummy streams open even when they
    >> >> are unneeded?
    >> 
    Samuel> I don't think there is: they remain dormant.
    >> 
    >> So, this is more of a Pulse question.  We know even dormant
    >> streams are sufficient to keep the audio card from suspending.

    Samuel> Yes, because the drivers want to be ready to emit sound very
    Samuel> quickly.  But to me it makes sense that e.g. after one
    Samuel> minute or such speech dispatcher shuts down its stream to
    Samuel> let the card get idle, at the expense of a little extra
    Samuel> latency to reopen it again, but that should be hardly
    Samuel> noticeable: it's only during work that one notices latency.

Yeah.
That makes sense to me, but is different than your earlier answer of it
shouldn't matter because they are dormant.
If there's a benefit in suspending the card that we lose even with
dormant streams, then that's a cost.
I cannot imagine having sd_dummy be low latency be worth any cost at
all:-)
Similarly for non-active synthesizers: high latency to switch synths
seems entirely reasonable.

It looks like the pulse code in speech-dispatcher may make this easier
than it was with the old code.
I'll see what I can pull together and see what happens.
I'll try and open the feature request soon, but throwing together an
initial implementation may take a couple of months just because it's
competing with a lot of things.



--Sam