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

Lee Revell
2006-01-05T20:28:15Z

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 21:18 +0100, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> On 2006-01-05, at 21:05, Lee Revell wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 21:03 +0100, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> >> On 2006-01-05, at 19:33, Lee Revell wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 13:44 +0100, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> >>>> Second - you still didn't explain why this allows you to conclude
> >>>> that sound mixing should in no way be done inside the kernel.
> >>>
> >>> It works perfectly right now in userspace.
> >>
> >> Yeah - for you maybe...
> >>
> >
> > Please rephrase your comment in the form of a useful bug report.
>
> Yes I will. But only after you stop spreading BS about how fine and
> generally dandy the situation about sound support in Linux is thanks
> to ALSA.

I'm not spreading BS, I'm trying to identify the real problems and get
them fixed. Unfortunately people like to bitch and moan a lot more than
they like to report bugs.

> One reports bugs only if one expects that the situation will improve.

Um, look at the alsa-devel archives or the ALSA CVS commit mailing list.
We close dozens of bugs each week. I personally closed more than 50
last week (most had been fixed months ago). 90% of ALSA development
happens through the bug tracker.

> Glaring problems on average commodity hardware one expect the
> developers to take
> care of without any notice.
>

HAHA, "average commodity hardware", that's a good one. I think you
VASTLY underestimate the difficulty of maintaining good ALSA drivers.
There are hundreds of times more sound chipset/codec combinations than
there are ALSA developers. This is not like network or disk controller
drivers where having the datasheet is the norm - in ALSA reverse
engineered drivers are the norm and there can be dozens of variations on
a single chipset all of which the driver must handle. It would be one
thing if the vendors helped but they don't - sound is considered desktop
stuff and they don't consider the Linux desktop market worth their time.

> However since the beginning the situation with ALSA has always been a
> lot of
> advertisement how well it will work but the results where always less
> then stellar
> if one looked at them from the functional side.
>

Check out the linux-audio-dev and linux-audio-user archives. ALSA has
been working perfectly for all of those users for years.

Lee