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

[Takashi Iwai]

At 16 Oct 2003 21:04:01 +0300,
Jussi Laako wrote:
> 
> 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.
 
did you try alsaconf script?  it's as easy as you wrote above.


> 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.

well, the same is true for 2.6 kernel, so far.
the build of alsa-driver tree doesn't work well if the kernel has
already ALSA supports.  it will be fixed soon later.

but you forgot one thing:  if you use the commercial OSS, you have no
chance to modify it by yourself.  it's a fate of binary-only stuffs.


Takashi