At Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:50:54 -0500, Brendan Pike wrote: > > Sean McNamara wrote: > > > > You are welcome to do whatever you want on your system, but don't assume that everyone wants what you want. > > </rant> > > _______________________________________________ > > > Or you could just avoid all this mess with Linux audio for the time > being and use a hardware mixing device instead. I realize laptop users > are going to bitchslap me for saying that but its true. > > The whole buggy software mixing situation with regards to applications > not working correctly or as intended is frustrating. OSS4 does it at > the kernel level because it tries to be transparent to all the > applications which think the device has hardware mixing capabilities. I > realize OSS4 can be buggy for some but its implementation is far more > compatible instead of the cocktail of sound servers and software > mixing routines we have in ALSA right now. > > Some apps out there require direct access to /dev/dsp or whatever, what > are we going to do? Hope somebody updates the program? (usually not > going to happen with older closed source games or whatnot). Take UT99 > for example, rarely does this ever work with any software mixing period. Well, we can categorize the demands: A. OSS-style access needed just because of fixed, binary-only things B. OSS-style access needed because of old written codes C. OSS-style access needed because of resource reduction (without server) The original question was about C. However, in this case, it's not guaranteed whether a kernel-side mixing requires less resources. A server solution could be in less amount, depending on the implementation. Nevertheless, one certain thing is that this question is not for generic desktop uses, but for a pretty limited use-case. Honestly, I don't mind if anyone introduces a kernel-side thing for that limited purpose like C for his own project. But, this won't hit the mainline, anyway... For other cases, the resource usage isn't *THAT* big problem at all. The only question is whether it works reliably or not. It seems that hooking via LD_PRELOAD doesn't work always. Another interesting approach for the OSS fixed devices is to route via a new FUSE char-driver extension by Tejun. This is of course more layer onto the existing setup, but it just works for cases A & B. Takashi _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list Alsa-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mailman.alsa-project.org/mailman/listinfo/alsa-devel
