[lsb-discuss] ALSA vs. OSS

Darren Davis ddavis at novell.com
Thu Sep 13 10:58:54 PDT 2007


George Kraft wrote:
> According to Linux Kernel in a Nutshell by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the
> "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is the current sound system
> for the Linux kernel.  An earlier sound system (OSS) has been
> deprecated, and almost all the older drivers have been removed from the
> kernel source tree."
>  
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/lkn/lkn_pdf/ch08.pdf
>
> I've been told that if an ALSA driver exists then the OSS driver is
> removed.  Also, ALSA allows to multiplex several audio streams and OSS
> does not.
>
> In short, I think it would be safe for the LSB to specify ALSA and not
> OSS.
>
>   

So, I just talked with Greg and Takashi (since they are here at the SUSE 
Labs conference with me).  They stated that from a kernel perspective 
that their is standardization of the internal kernel driver interface 
(not the user space interface), and Greg says this is NOT and 
endorsement for choosing the ALSA API as the LSB sound API standard.  So 
in short, ALSA may not be it (and most likely not).

Darren




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