[lsb-discuss] ALSA vs. OSS

[John Cherry]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 12:12 -0500, 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.
> 

I would agree that it is safe to specify ALSA.  Since ALSA is a
driver-level API, most consumers of the ALSA interfaces are other
components in the audio stack (not audio applications themselves).

OSS will be shipped with distros for quite some time because it is a
cross-platform legacy interface...and, it has recently been opened up to
the community.  However, this should not be a detractor from specifying
ALSA for LSB.

The next layer of the stack (see attached) is the sound server layer
(PulseAudio, JACK, etc.).  Audio applications plug in at this level, so
I suspect the follow-on LSB standardization will happen at this level.
The focus of FOMS this year is to hack out the libsydneyaudio interfaces
for the sound server layer.  This may be the best bet for community
agreement.

John

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