ALSA, OSS and the pointless of switching to Pulse [Was: Paris summit]

[Jan Claeys]

Op ma, 26-06-2006 te 13:51 +0100, schreef Paul Sladen:
> > I think we should drop ALSA OSS emulation in favour of /dev/dsp
> > being a user-space character device provided by some kind of mixer
> 
> Yes, it needs a userspace mixing solution in the middle;  be that
> 'dmix' or 'esd'. 

>From PulseAudio's primary author's blog:

> padsp works more or less like that ESOUND tool known as esddsp.
> However, it is much cleaner in design and thus works with many more
> applications than the original tool. Proper locking is implemented
> which allows it to work in multithreaded applications. In addition to
> mere /dev/dsp emulation it wraps /dev/sndstat and /dev/mixer. Proper
> synchronization primitives are also available, which enables lip-sync
> movie playback using padsp on mplayer. Other applications that are
> known to work properly with padsp are aumix, libao, XMMS, sox. There
> are some things padsp doesn't support (yet): that's most notably
> recording, and mmap() wrapping. Recording will be added in a later
> version. mmap() support is available in esddsp but not in padsp. I am
> reluctant to add support for this, because it cannot work properly
> when it comes to playback latency handling. However, latency handling
> this the primary reasoning for using mmap(). In addition the hack that
> is included in esddsp works only for Quake2 and Quake3, both being
> Free Software now. It probably makes more sense to fix those two games
> than implementing a really dirty hack in padsp. Remember that you can
> always use the original esddsp tools since Polypaudio offers full
> protocol compatibility with ESOUND.


-- 
Jan Claeys