Re: Is it time for remove (crap) ALSA from kernel tree ?

Lee Revell
2007-06-28T03:42:06Z

On 6/26/07, Andreas Hartmetz <ahartmetz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not put the whole sound system in userland? It has been done before. Sound
> is just not performance critical at all and it's almost never mission
> critical.

There are dozens of companies selling Linux powered professional audio
gear, multiple pro audio centric distros, and hundreds of serious free
software audio apps. I suspect these developers and their users would
disagree.

I agree with you about userland drivers but at minimum this would
require merging the -rt kernel patches, otherwise the latency/jitter
will be too high to do anything but toy desktop sounds, then you need
a mergeable mechanism for doing DMA and interrupt handling in
userspace. It has been attempted before but never evolved to the
point where you could drive a complex device like the emu10k1.

Lee