On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 04:28, Paul Davis wrote: > a few corrections: > > >Well, the main differences between the OSS-Layer and ALSA are: > >1.) alsa is the new driver in linux kernel >= 2.6.X > >2.) oss-layers need ioctl() - calls to manage/configure sound devices (and ioctl() > >calls > >are just possible for root-users !!!!!),so oss is really user-unfriendly if you want > > to programm a application > > this isn't true. any user that can open a device can call ioctl on the > device. the real difference in the API design between the two is that > in OSS, you make system calls (open/read/write/close/ioctl/mmap etc) > directly, which means that any transformation of the data or other > "clever" stuff has to happen inside the device driver as part of the > kernel. in ALSA, you make library calls (snd_pcm_open, etc), which > allows ALSA to have a rich set of "plugins" that can transform the > data, virtualize the device, and do all kinds of other things, all in > a user-space library where it can do no harm to anything except your > application. > > but i'll put it a little more strongly: NOBODY in 2003 should start a > new application using the OSS API. NOBODY.
I'd also like to chime in that OSS is not being worked on by anybody, as near as I can tell. If you want any audio hardware supported, the action is in ALSA. - mo
