There has been relatively little noise out of the realtime preemption camp in recent months. That does not mean that the realtime developers have been idle, though; instead, they are preparing for the realtime endgame: the merger of the bulk of the remaining patches into the mainline kernel. The 2.6.31-rc4-rt1 tree recently announced by Thomas Gleixner shows the results of much of this work.

Over the next few weeks my articles will focus on software systems designed with special consideration for music composition by the use of algorithms. Wiktionary defines an algorithm as "... a precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps".

Much of the realtime scheduling work in Linux has been based around getting the best behavior out of the POSIX realtime scheduling classes. Techniques like priority inheritance, for example, exist to ensure that the highest-priority task really can run within a bounded period of time.

Threaded interrupt handlers came out early in the discussion. This feature was merged into the mainline for the 2.6.30 kernel; it is useful in realtime situations because it allows interrupt handlers to be prioritized and scheduled like any other process.

In this conclusion to my survey of algorithmic music composition systems for Linux I present Christopher Ariza's athenaCL.

LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one professional quality application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates.

Here you can see How to Monitor Realtime Incoming Network Traffic in Ubuntu / Debian Linux with simple Utility IFSTAT

How to Install ifstat

In this second part of my survey I focus on the tools that achieve this new synthesis of arts. Alas, due to space constraints I am unable to include all the software I would like to have reviewed, but perhaps a future article will deal with those programs. Meanwhile, I present to my readers these brief profiles of Pd, Fluxus, and AVSynthesis.

Linus has released the 2.6.25 kernel. After nearly three months of development and the merging of over 12,000 patches from almost 1200 developers, this kernel is now considered ready for wider use.