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

Tomasz Torcz
2006-01-05T18:47:03Z

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 01:36:20PM -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 12:43 +0100, Florian Schmidt wrote:
> > On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 02:16:35 -0500
> > Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 11:37 +0100, tapas wrote:
> > > > ALSA's kernel level OSS emulation (as opposed to aoss) cannot provide
> > > > software mixing. As aoss cannot provide OSS emulation to all OSS apps
> > >
> > > Why not?
> >
> > I did write it out before. aoss is a LD_PRELOAD hack. Apps/libs that
> > resolve the system call symbols at build time cannot be made to use
> > these calls from a different lib (which is what LD_PRELOAD tries to do).
> > A famous example is libc for which a workaround was added (as libc
> > offers its own mechanism to intercept fopen() et al.). Others can lurk
> > in the background, too. It would even be trivial to write an app that
> > aoss will not work with - ever (unless the code be modified - which is
> > not an option for closed source apps).
> >
> > It simply cannot ever work with _all_ apps (as opposed to kernel level
> > OSS emu which can be made to work with _all_ apps (at least in
> > principle)).
> >
>
> OK so you can contrive an example. Have we ever seen a real world app
> where aoss can't work?

Skype. Earlier Quake 3 Arena (now Q3A is open source with SDL sound,
so it had native ALSA).
They're more widely used that musical software for which ALSA seem to
be written. People needing <1ms latency are "obscure corner cases" in
real world.

--
Tomasz Torcz Only gods can safely risk perfection,
zdzichu@irc.-nie.spam-.pl it's a dangerous thing for a man. -- Alia