Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 19:05 +0000, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:
> On 1/21/08, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Except that it's completely insane to try to diverge from the upstream
> > kernel and userland here.
> 
> Uh?  You are supposed to costumize the kernel as you feel like it.
> Freedom of choice and all.  Also, if it may bother you, why not bring
> the issue up to Mr Torvalds?

By diverging from upstream, you bear the entire responsibility for
making sure your modifications work with later kernel releases.  As the
kernel moves forward, your custom code becomes harder and harder to
merge with each new kernel release, because the upstream kernel people
don't care what customizations you've done.

The end result:  divergence == lots of work

There's already not enough people to do the work, therefore divergence
is just an awful idea.  Andres already has enough to do when merge times
come around, and having two of him doesn't fix the divergence problem at
all, it just punts the problem out another 6 months.

Divergence is usually manageable for small patches, tweaks, and single
drivers.  But for something like the entire sound framework?  That's
just insane.

Dan

> > Plus, does OSS support software mixing so
> > that multiple processes pumping out different bitrates and channels of
> > audio can all talk to the same sound device at the same time?  Granted,
> > ALSA doesn't have that working as well as I'd like, but if OSS doesn't
> > support that then there is no point in switching to OSS.
> 
> Certainly.  Just an extreme example I tried for fun in my system:
> 
> YouTube (Flash)
> foobar2000 (Wine)
> Kaffeine (Xine)
> ogg123 (libao)
> 
> All at the same time sending a bunch of different signals (audio
> cacophony but still understandable) to the speakers.  Different
> bitrates and volume.  Through OSS 4.
> 
> The only problem with support for OSS in the XO is that there is no
> driver for the CS5536 yet (there is one for CS5530 though).  I checked
> yesterday.  That is the only reason why this may be a bad idea.  But
> you know what, writing drivers for OSS is trivial for people who know
> how to write drivers.  If people agree it may be a good idea to
> improve the audio system of the XO, then someone will certainly write
> the driver and spending one or two days doing it for the future
> benefits of OSS is certainly a good idea.
> 
> -Ivo