On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 07:48:27PM -0400, Predrag Punosevac wrote: > A friend of mine who is an avid NetBSD user kept complaining about how > bad is audio on NetBSD. After getting sick of hearing complains, > I asked on OSS mailing lists about OSSv4 support for NetBSD and OpenBSD. > I actually got a very interesting answer > > http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3133 > > I recall OSS being discussed on this mailing list after OSS went > open source and changed the license. Can Jake or any other developers > in charge of audio on OpenBSD explain the issues involved in porting > OSSv4 to OpenBSD? > > I personally have fantastic experience with our audio but I would > think that OpenBSD could benefit at least from extra audio drivers. > Am I very wrong? Sorry for the noise.
audio(4) and all the current audio drivers would need to be modularized to not conflict with OSSv4. OpenBSD doesn't use modules by default, so users who would want to use OSSv4 would be running an unsupported system. I have tried taking small bits from 4Front drivers (for cmpci(4) and azalia(4)), but it has not been very helpful, for various reasons. I've learned more by looking at FreeBSD and ALSA drivers. some of the 4Front drivers were developed under NDAs, so the only "documentation" available to us is the driver source. having 2 vastly different audio APIs is not helpful, at all. arguably, OSSv4 would be a third (or fourth even) audio API that we would be supporting, as OSSv4 is different than OSSv3, which we already support with ossaudio(3). even though OpenBSD and NetBSD share the same basic audio code, there are numerous differences, starting with aucat(1) and sio_open(3) and going all the way down to the low level drivers. it appears this diversion is going to continue. I've tried sending patches for simple bugs azalia(4) to NetBSD devs that never got acted on, and they have a GSoC project to add support for stream mixing in the kernel. -- jake...@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
