Re: OSSv4 on OpenBSD
On 2009-05-25, Daniel Gracia Garallar danie...@electronicagracia.com wrote: Sure and additional framework should make easy porting other projects to OpenBSD, but as far as audio programming is related, native audio support is nicely implemented and rock solid. most of the applications which already have some way to use multiple audio backends are reasonably straightforward to port to sndio - there's quite a lot of example code in the ports tree. Just missing some samplerate convert not relying in aucat! So I can use it on several devices at once, but that's a patch -filtering is the hard trick- I'll work into :) keeping samplerate conversion out of the kernel was a deliberate decision; you can run multiple copies of aucat with different sockets/devices.
Re: OSSv4 on OpenBSD
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? Jacob explained why the job is technically hard for OSS devs. Also since ports don't use the OSSv4 API, it would be of limited usefulness. 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. in theory it could be possible to borrow certain OSS drivers and to tweak them to become part of our kernel. But: - if the sound card is not documented (OSS uses NDAs for certain drivers), we would take code that we don't understand and that we're unable to maintain, leading to low quality code. By doing this we indirectly support development model using NDAs, which is wrong. Not motivating for me. - for documented sound cards, we often already have drivers, and given the difference between our kernel internals and OSS internals, it's easier to just write our own driver. IMO the most important is to have quality support for _all_ integrated audio devices (azalia, ac97, cmpci) so audio just works and support few well-identified professional cards (envy, usb) for advanced applications. It's more about quality than supporting a lot of devices. -- Alexandre
Re: OSSv4 on OpenBSD
Actually, when audio is a concern, I'm quite happy with the audio(4) framework of sio_open(3) and friends. I've just finished a remote PMR control app where real-time audio is needed, and all the bells and whistles are up to the task: multiple devices support -I'm working with four Behringer USB audio cards-, full-duplex, mixer control et al. Sure and additional framework should make easy porting other projects to OpenBSD, but as far as audio programming is related, native audio support is nicely implemented and rock solid. Just missing some samplerate convert not relying in aucat! So I can use it on several devices at once, but that's a patch -filtering is the hard trick- I'll work into :) Regards! Dani Jacob Meuser escribis: 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.
Re: OSSv4 on OpenBSD
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
