Re: [2.6 patch] schedule obsolete OSS drivers for removal

Marcin Dalecki
2006-01-04T16:43:39Z

On 2006-01-04, at 15:46, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

>>> Still would be nice if users of ALSA who have the OSS backwards
>>> compat
>>> enabled would thus also get transparent software mixing for all apps
>>> using the OSS API.
>>> not crucial, that's not what I'm saying, just nice if it would be
>>> possible.
>>
>> Technicall it's trivial to implement the soft-mixing in the kernel.
>> The question is whether it's the right implementation.
>> We have a user-space softmix for ALSA, and aoss wrapper for OSS using
>> it. (I know aoss still has some problems that should be fixed,
>> though.)
>>
> Software mixing in the kernel is like FPU ops in the kernel...

Could you please elaborate a tad bit more on the analogy? It doesn't
appear to be stunningly obvious.
Are you aware of the reasons why floating point operations are
avoided inside the kernel?
They are *not* principal - it's just engineering pragmatism.