Re: Kernel OSS vs ALSA

Thomas Sailer (sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch)
Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:12:38 +0200

Michael Poole wrote:
>
> Thomas Sailer <sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch> writes:
>
> > > * simultaneous multiple streams, with mixing as needed
> >
> > User space IMO
>
> Bad idea IMO. For highly interactive applications (eg games, but also more
> serious applications of VR) you don't want to take (a minimum of) a full
> context switch before the sound card even has a prayer of seeing a new
> audio sample. It's just not reasonable to restrict access to the audio hw

Having format converters and sample rate converters in the kernel is
scary.
Straight mixing is doable, but that means that every app accessing sound
has to be using the same format, likely the best the sound hardware can
support,
i.e. 48kHz 16bit 2channels for most current hardware. While this
may not necessarily break the OSS API, it will break many current
OSS apps. And yes, no mmap

Tom

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