[LAU] FreeBSD

[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2015, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Jan 2015 18:13:51 +0100, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
>> ?alsa is there? and compiling a kernel it's not that hard
>> https://www.freebsd.org/ports/audio.html
>
> As far as I know this is impossible or at least not easy to do.

All I see on the web page from the OP is the Alsa libraries and packages 
for the Alsa tools (user space stuff).  I still don't see where you can 
actually put Alsa itself into your kernel and get yourself beyond OSS 
style sound and its /dev/dsp mentality.  For some of the nicer audio 
cards (from RME for example) with lots and lots of inputs, that would be 
really nice.  (See the state of FreeBSD audio here, especially their 
progress on trying to create an Envy24 driver: 
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound)

So FreeBSD will give you OSS-style drivers in the kernel, and no 
realtime.  It's impressive that they've done the work necessary to get 
Ardour to run in that environment (and sort of work), but it still makes 
me ask...why?  Until there are some improvements in their kernel, it 
makes about as much sense as trying to run Ardour on Solaris/sparc.

> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/arch-handbook/oss.html
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_System#Free.2C_proprietary.2C_free
>
>> ?apt-get purge pulseaudio systemd
>> apt-get? install sysvinit
>
> To avoid pulseaudio there are several solutions. Avoiding systemd 
> likely will be impossible soon. At least the kernel is protected 
> against some rash implementations, since Linus Torvalds doesn't like 
> Kay Sievers that much. However, if you want to stay with Linux, get 
> used to binary log files and other hard changes of Linux policies. 
> Unlikely that in the close future Linux still will work without 
> systemd. Assumed it should still work without systemd, at least 
> initscripts likely need a replacement.

The solution I'm using is offered by Gentoo -- eudev.  They've forked 
the udev codebase from before the introduction of systemd as a necessary 
dependency, and they've been merging in changes and updates ever since. 
If you run Gentoo, you can install eudev and totally free yourself from 
systemd.  It'd be nice to see the other distros start picking eudev up 
as well.

They also let you turn off PulseAudio support in a $USE flag, so that 
nothing on your system will even look for the libraries because nothing 
will be compiled for it.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky