Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [2.6 patch] schedule obsolete OSS drivers for

Thorsten Knabe
2005-08-02T00:13:43Z

On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Andrew Haninger wrote:

> Thorsten: Please remember to include the list(s) when emailing those
> links/numbers. I'd like to be able to watch it, too, and add any
> information that I can, rather than entering a duplicate bug.

Hello.

I have taken a closer look at the ALSA AD1816 sound driver during the last
weekend. Here are my findings:

On vanilla Linux 2.6.12.3 and 2.6.13-rc4 modprobe hangs in D-state when
loading the snd-ad1816a module. No messages have been logged to the syslog
and the system is otherwise stable. Of course the sound card is unusable.
On Linux 2.6.8 (as shipped with current Debian Sarge), vanilla Linux
2.6.10 and Linux 2.6.11.12 the module loads fine.

I have done some tests with xmms(Debian), kphone(VoIP-Phone/Debian) and
iaxcomm(VoIP-Phone/self-made). Audio playback with xmms is always fine
using either ALSA or OSS emulation. Using OSS emulation with one of the
VoIP phones, playback and recording stop a few seconds after the call is
started. Using the ALSA interface with kphone works, but there is a
continuous clicking approximately 3 times per second. Also audio latency
is poor compared to the OSS driver. iaxcomm does not support the ALSA
audio interface, thus no problems here. :-)
The native OSS driver is fine on all kernels with all tested applications.

Also the ALSA driver does not have an equivalent for the
"ad1816_clockfreq" option of the OSS driver. The AD1816 chip requires a
33MHz reference clock, however some cards use a different (mostly
32.125MHz) clock, thus the audio sample rate has to be corrected before it
is written to the hardware registers for proper playback and recording
speed.

I have not filed any bug reports to the ALSA bug tracking system so far,
but will do so tomorrow and add the corresponding bug numbers to this
thread.

Thorsten

--
___
| | / E-Mail: linux@thorsten-knabe.de
|horsten |/\nabe WWW: http://linux.thorsten-knabe.de