Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753730AbXFXWoV (ORCPT ); Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:44:21 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751491AbXFXWoN (ORCPT ); Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:44:13 -0400 Received: from viefep18-int.chello.at ([213.46.255.22]:38352 "EHLO viefep16-int.chello.at" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751742AbXFXWoM (ORCPT ); Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:44:12 -0400 Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:44:11 +0200 From: Carlo Wood To: Alan Cox Cc: Tomasz =?utf-8?Q?K=C5=82oczko?= , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Is it time for remove (crap) ALSA from kernel tree ? Message-ID: <20070624224411.GB21724@alinoe.com> Mail-Followup-To: Carlo Wood , Alan Cox , Tomasz =?utf-8?Q?K=C5=82oczko?= , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20070624200837.16e11305@the-village.bc.nu> <20070624215724.025a5de5@the-village.bc.nu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20070624215724.025a5de5@the-village.bc.nu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2062 Lines: 45 On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 09:57:24PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > Sory Alan but I don't want philosophical/historical discuss. > > Try to answer on question "ALSA or OSS ?" using *only* technical arguments. > > We dropped OSS for ALSA for technical reasons. Those being that ALSA > - has a better audio API > - is more flexible > - provides OSS as emulation > - supports more hardware I sent a patch to the ALSA developers 4 years ago. It was never included in the kernel :/ Here's the comment from a script that I once wrote to make some closed-source dinosar code run (speech recognition) on modern linux: # Note that ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), the sound drivers that # replace the older OSS as of kernel 2.5, also introduce a problem for some # soundcards: unlike the OSS drivers, the ALSA drivers limit the recording # buffer to the hardware limit of your sound card. For example, the SB Live! # only has two 'period' buffers (called fragments before), and although # viavoice requests an 'arbitrary number of periods, size 1024 bytes', it # only gets two periods of 1024 bytes: 2048 bytes in total! The ViaVoice # engine however doesn't even process sound until it sees at least 6102 bytes. # The 'solution' for this is to increase the buffer size (from 1024 to say # 8192), this script also takes care of that. Unfortunately, also that is # possibly not enough: the sound is read from the hardware in chunks of # 'period size' and having only two buffers this is often causing an underrun. # When ALSA sees an underrun... it stops the sound stream. My (four year old) patch can be found here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/alsa/index.html I STILL think that ALSA should restart the stream after an underrun, but I am not someone who asks twice :p usually. -- Carlo Wood - 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/