Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932361AbWACOdH (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:33:07 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932356AbWACOdH (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:33:07 -0500 Received: from mail.metronet.co.uk ([213.162.97.75]:60878 "EHLO mail.metronet.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932350AbWACOdG (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:33:06 -0500 From: Alistair John Strachan To: David Lang Subject: Re: [2.6 patch] schedule obsolete OSS drivers for removal Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 14:33:03 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.9 Cc: Andi Kleen , Adrian Bunk , perex@suse.cz, alsa-devel@alsa-project.org, James@superbug.demon.co.uk, sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch, linux-sound@vger.kernel.org, zab@zabbo.net, kyle@parisc-linux.org, parisc-linux@lists.parisc-linux.org, jgarzik@pobox.com, Thorsten Knabe , zwane@commfireservices.com, zaitcev@yahoo.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20050726150837.GT3160@stusta.de> <200601031452.10855.ak@suse.de> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200601031433.04131.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1818 Lines: 42 On Tuesday 03 January 2006 13:58, David Lang wrote: > On Tue, 3 Jan 2006, Andi Kleen wrote: > >> Even if Adrian's not trying to make this point (he's just removing > >> duplicate drivers, and opting for the newer ones), we accepted ALSA into > >> the kernel. It's probably about time we let OSS die properly, for sanity > >> purposes. > > > > Avoiding bloat is more important. > > given that the ALSA drivers are not going to be removed, isn't it bloat to > have two drivers for the same card? Normally this isn't too big a deal in Linux; eventually one gets removed, but not until it is substantially inferior than the other (or broken, or not compiling, or unmaintained..). > yes, an individual compiled kernel may be slightly smaller by continueing > to support the OSS driver, but the source (and the maintinance) are > significantly worse by haveing two drivers instead of just one. If there are two separate maintainers it's probably not a lot worse. I think the argument pretty much has to remain "ALSA drivers are technically superior, OSS drivers have unfixable limitations", and that should be a good enough reason to see them removed. Perhaps Andi's concerns about ALSA bloat could also be concerned. I don't know enough about the "high end" features of ALSA to comment on whether they could become optional (currently there are few driver-generic options in the Kconfig file). -- Cheers, Alistair. 'No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.' Third year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/