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

[Jussi Laako]

On Wed, 2003-10-15 at 23:33, Paul Davis wrote:

> yes, sure, so the docs could be better and make it easier for you to
> find out how to do this. but the point was that OSS offers *no* xrun
> control. xruns can't be detected in user space alone (even in the
> kernel, its not 100% reliable in the face of interrupt blocking for an
> entire buffer). ALSA at least offers you some choices with this.

Unless hardware provides xrun detection..

It was back in 2001/10/6 when I started ALSA 0.9 support, documentation
was absent at the time. I was able to fix it at 2002/9/29, quite a long
time to figure it out.

Biggest problem of ALSA is difficulty of installation to the end user.
And difficulty to figure out which channel in ALSA is which input
channel on card (M-Audio Delta1010 in this case). This is way much
easier in OSS (/dev/sndstat). This is why I recommend OSS to the end
users. ALSA still lacks the "./install" -> [OK] -> [OK] -> [Exit and
save] -> "soundon" -installation.

SuSE is doing OK on the installation area, but their biggest problem is
hacking the ALSA into their kernel, making it pretty difficult to change
the kernel while keeping ALSA stuff in their distro working.


-- 
Jussi Laako <jussi.laako at pp.inet.fi>