"Charles M. Hannum" writes:
> > Compressed video decoding under NetBSD so you can watch videos without 
> > annoying dropouts?
> > Using a NetBSD box as a phone?
> > Doing a software modem on your NetBSD box (the originally described
> > app)?
> 
> *None* of those call for hard real-time in the sense that people have
> been spewing about.

Dunno. software modems are pretty demanding. Miss a few bytes at the
right moment and carrier drops.

> For comparison sake, I point out that BeOS does some pretty snazzy
> real-time video just using a carefully tuned lottery scheduler --
> which is pretty far from hard real-time.

Well, okay. If that is in fact good enough for most users most of the
time, then maybe we should be working on a "soft" real time system on
a similar basis to BeOS. However, that is not to say that the problem
should be fully ignored.

.pm