FreeBSD's sound system lineage....

[Julian Elischer]

Diane Bruce wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 12:44:48AM +0800, Ariff Abdullah wrote:
>> On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:28:03 -0700
>> Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> wrote:
>>> Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>>>> Quoting Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> (Mon, 23 Jul 2007
>>>> 07:24:36 -0700):
> ...
>>>>> The OSS people have offered us the use (from memory) of their
>>>> ALSA<->OSS > shim library. It would be nice if one of the sound
>>>> people > would talk to them and see if the offer still stands.
> 
> I looked at that months ago.
> 
>>>> It needs kernel support which we don't have. I don't know how
>>>> hard/easy it is to provide this support.
> 
> As far as I could see, a simple kqueue shim would handle the event side.
> 
>>> That's where we probably need someone like Ariff to have a look at
>>> it.
>>>
>>> I think they also offered to help us get that support.
>>>
>> ALSA is purely userland stuffs, much like other things like SDL,
> 
> Yes. I agree, I believe kqueue would help us here.
> 
>> pulseaudio, arts, jack, yada yada, so on. All you need to do is grab
>> plain alsa library, replacing alsa kernel call -> oss ioctl (much
>> like NetBSD/OpenBSD did with their sunaudio -> liboss), and produce
>> appropriate libalsa depending on your target (linux binary for linux
> 
> I've got a partial shim already started. My major problem was the docs
> for ALSA are terrible, at least the ones I saw. I don't like
> trying to navigate a wiki for docs.
> 
>> apps). Leveraging hardware features provided by ALSA call is a
>> different story, though.
> 
> About all I could see ALSA did was it adds the equivalent of our vchans
> and an event driven interface. All very overly complex with bells and whistles.
> 
> I've started digging through my ALSA code shim. I think I could use help.
> I wanted to be GPL clean, I think I am so far. ;-)
> 
> Any volunteers?

well I think the OSS Alsa library they offered us woudl be a good start as 
it apparently already mostly works..


> 
> - Diane
> --
> - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db