[Qemu-devel] Removing old/unused audio backends

[Qemu-devel] Removing old/unused audio backends

[Kővágó Zoltán]

Hi,

I'll be doing doing gsoc this year, where I'll rework the audio backend 
of qemu to allow multiple backend instances and multichannel audio. 
This will of course require modifications of the existing audio drivers 
in qemu, so it's probably a good idea to remove drivers that nobody use 
anymore (and probably bug rotten anyway).

Here are the drivers that could go in my opinion:
esd: no longer maintained, last release in 2008, replaced by PulseAudio
fmod: not sure about this one, but apparently it's some no longer 
developed library that's also proprietary.
sdl: is broken 
(http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg02198.html), 
and we have native drivers for almost all platforms
winwave: DirectSound should be a superior choice on windows (even though 
it's also deprecated)

alsa needed on Linux, oss on BSDs, coreaudio on Mac, dsound on Windows; 
spice and pa are also needed.  wav is probably useful for debugging.

Do you guys have any objections about removing the above mentioned audio 
drivers in the near future?

Thanks,
Zoltan

Re: [Qemu-devel] Removing old/unused audio backends

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On Do, 2015-05-21 at 00:05 +0200, Kővágó Zoltán wrote:

> Here are the drivers that could go in my opinion:
> esd: no longer maintained, last release in 2008, replaced by PulseAudio
> fmod: not sure about this one, but apparently it's some no longer 
> developed library that's also proprietary.
> sdl: is broken 
> (http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg02198.html), 
> and we have native drivers for almost all platforms
> winwave: DirectSound should be a superior choice on windows (even though 
> it's also deprecated)

Looks all reasonable to me.

If someone has objections and/or used any of these backends recently
please speak up now.

When preparing patches to drop them please create one patch per backend.
That way we can bring back a single backend -- should the need arise --
using 'git revert'.

> alsa needed on Linux, oss on BSDs, coreaudio on Mac, dsound on Windows; 
> spice and pa are also needed.  wav is probably useful for debugging.

For completeness:  The 'none' dummy backend needs to stay too.

cheers,
  Gerd

Re: [Qemu-devel] Removing old/unused audio backends

[Cole Robinson]

On 05/21/2015 02:52 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On Do, 2015-05-21 at 00:05 +0200, Kővágó Zoltán wrote:
> 
>> Here are the drivers that could go in my opinion:
>> esd: no longer maintained, last release in 2008, replaced by PulseAudio
>> fmod: not sure about this one, but apparently it's some no longer 
>> developed library that's also proprietary.
>> sdl: is broken 
>> (http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg02198.html), 
>> and we have native drivers for almost all platforms
>> winwave: DirectSound should be a superior choice on windows (even though 
>> it's also deprecated)
> 
> Looks all reasonable to me.

Slightly related, it's probably time to drop malc from the MAINTAINERS file
too... I don't think he's posted to qemu-devel since 2012

- Cole

Re: [Qemu-devel] Removing old/unused audio backends

[Cole Robinson]

On 05/21/2015 02:49 PM, Cole Robinson wrote:
> On 05/21/2015 02:52 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>> On Do, 2015-05-21 at 00:05 +0200, Kővágó Zoltán wrote:
>>
>>> Here are the drivers that could go in my opinion:
>>> esd: no longer maintained, last release in 2008, replaced by PulseAudio
>>> fmod: not sure about this one, but apparently it's some no longer 
>>> developed library that's also proprietary.
>>> sdl: is broken 
>>> (http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg02198.html), 
>>> and we have native drivers for almost all platforms
>>> winwave: DirectSound should be a superior choice on windows (even though 
>>> it's also deprecated)
>>
>> Looks all reasonable to me.
> 
> Slightly related, it's probably time to drop malc from the MAINTAINERS file
> too... I don't think he's posted to qemu-devel since 2012
> 

And his mail is bouncing (which I'm pretty sure has been the case doing for
years too)

- Cole