On 10/8/07, King InuYasha ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
Wine must not let go of the OSS support since OSS was recently made GPL'd and CDDL'd for use in FOSS kernels by its maker (4Front) and OSS is the POSIX audio system of choice for nearly every time except Linux. Linux does not use OSS anymore and uses ALSA. Since Linux is the primary target of Wine, obviously ALSA needs to be well supported. Since under normal conditions ALSA and OSS do horrible mixing and handling of audio (kernel or audio module bug, whatever, its still a problem), I'm betting that was why the ESD and JACK drivers were made. I am not disputing the JACK driver because I recognize that JACK may be necessary for certain tasks.
However, the ESD driver should be replaced with something more up to date. I hope that PulseAudio would be that replacement. I don't think I suggested removing the baseline stuff (ALSA and OSS). PulseAudio is what I would consider to be the middle man between JACK and ALSA/OSS. Mainly because it does have some of the upscale features (low-latency, network sound, etc.) and some of the commodity features (superior mixing, multiple audio backend support like ALSA, OSS, and Win32MM, etc.) I believe this balance would help with Wine sound very much.
Certainly the new scheduler in Linux kernel 2.6.23 would improve how the kernel/kernel modules handle threading and processing the audio streams, but that wouldn't necessarily help with the baser problems (mixing, stream locks, etc.) though it does help with stuff like stuttering. I also recognize that Alexandre may not want to support so many audio backends. I find only three absolutely necessary, and the fourth one is widely clamored for. The necessary ones are: JACK, OSS, and PulseAudio. The widely clamored one is ALSA. Why? Because ALSA is ENTIRELY Linux specific. Wine is to be a Win32 to UNIX translation layer for compiled applications. If too much focus on being Linux-specific is given, I believe it will mess up general FOSS adoption as a whole.
Just my two cents.... :)
On 10/8/07, Tijl Coosemans tijl@ulyssis.org wrote:
On Monday 08 October 2007 14:43:30 Dave Phillips wrote:
Well, first I'd suggest simply supporting ALSA as thoroughly as necessary or possible. It is the default kernel sound system, Wine may as well incorporate it as well as it can. Supporting the deprecated OSS API might be a good idea too, through ALSA's OSS-compatibility layer. As one devel noted, it may be a good idea to forego further development of things like the NAS and ESD servers until a more solid basis exists for ALSA/OSS.
I just wanted to add that OSS isn't deprecated. ALSA is Linux-only. OSS is a multiplatform solution.