[linux-audio-dev] Linux VERSUS OSS ???

[guenter geiger]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Paul Davis wrote:
> >How I understand it - and I could need some clarification from the
> >real driver pros - one of the goals of ALSA was to modularize driver
> >architecture and get more tasks away from the kernel to user land or
> >expressed another way: abstract software design from hardware design.
> >This in turn should make it easier to write drivers for ALSA or maybe
> >easier to write drivers that provide more functionality?
> >
> >Am I describing this somehow correctly?
>
> almost. i think it would be more accurate to say "easier to write
> drivers for ALSA and easier to provide additional functionality in
> userspace via alsa-lib". IMHO the core idea of ALSA is to limit
> drivers to simply exporting the capabilities of the hardware up to
> user space, and leaving it to alsa-lib to do various things with
> that. this is quite different to OSS, in which all the action is in
> the kernel. in addition, a lot of code in the kernel is shared between
> drivers.
>
> but note: compared to OS X, writing drivers for ALSA is still
> disturbingly complex. this is mostly due to OS X's use of C++ within
> the kernel, and so there's not much ALSA can do about this.

Hi,

You say that the alsa kernel drivers export the  hardware capabilities to
user level.
Would it be possible to write an API in C++ for ALSA then, basically
not using the alsalib, but the fast hardware abstraction ?

Guenter