OSS Audio

Alexander Leidinger Alexander at leidinger.net
Mon Dec 18 16:11:56 UTC 2017


Quoting Sid <sid at bsdmail.com> (from Sat, 16 Dec 2017 23:53:17 +0100):

> I've had a few misconceptions.
>
> Bluebee Blubeeme said, 4Front has a modern OSS implementation that  
> is under a FreeBSD license.
>
> The model of Sound on FreeBSD is, three layers:
> 1. The API, where programs use libraries (of respective sound  
> architecture) to access the sound server.
> 2. The sound server: OSS, Sndio, Portaudio, JACK, ALSA, native, etc
> 3. FreeBSD's base is always OSS (OpenBSD's driver is sndio); sound  
> servers connect to and use this.

It's a little bit different.

  From application to hardware it is like:
   5) application
   4) maybe some infrastructure layer (jack, portaudio)
   3) the API (for linux: ALSA libs, for FreeBSD: opening the device  
nodes and issues ioctls = the OSS API)
   2) the kernel code
   1) the hardware

So FreeBSD is a target from layer 2 until layer 3. Everything above  
depends 100% on the application you are using.

> The part of OSS in name, that is a mess, is the API structure, and  
> various implementations. In FreeBSD for instance, when a program  
> uses an OSS API, I hear that developers, need to write so many  
> patches, because different OSS frontends are not standardized. Most

FreeBSD implements the OSSv4 API. Maybe not in v4.2, but those are  
extensions are not really that much important for this discussion. The  
important part is, that we support OSSv4 since about FreeBSD 8, and  
that the main part of playing audio is not changed between 4.0 and  
4.2, so it doesn't matter much if we talk about the FreeBSD  
implementation of OSSv4 or the 4Front implementation of OSSv4.2.

The issues which come at hand are so far either at layer 5 or 4. For  
issues at layer 3 I have not seen any prove or procedure how to repeat  
the issue so far (and I'm interested to see a procedure so that we can  
repeat the issue(s) people talk about here).

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander at Leidinger.net: PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
http://www.FreeBSD.org    netchild at FreeBSD.org  : PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
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