On Tue, 2 Dec 2025, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 12/1/25 21:58, Alexandre Ratchov wrote:
On Mon, Dec 01, 2025 at 10:20:49PM +0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
cases. Also when using jack you'd want to have a QEMU backend for it not
It would be great if people with very specific or constrained requirements
on qemu audio could check if the GStreamer backend fits their need.
I'm thinking mainly about their simplicity.
Dropping the system API backends would add an extra sophisticated
layer (GStreamer) between the system and the program. In theory, an
unlimited number of software layers may be stacked in a program, but
the more layers there are, the more fragile the program tends to
be. Based on my limited experience, when things went wrong, the system
backends were simpler to debug and make work than the big frameworks.
IMHO, the system API backends won't hurt GStreamer users, so I see no
reason to remove them.
I mostly agree. Perhaps the DirectSound backend could be removed by just
letting Windows use SDL (unlike macOS, Windows doesn't have a "native" GUI
layer), and the ALSA backend is also not so useful in my opinion. But all
the others have a reason to be there.
ALSA is also useful as the native sound backend for Linux. I'd say it can
already do what pulseaudio or pipewire do so those are not so useful in my
opinion not ALSA. :-)
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
