On Tue, Dec 02, 2025 at 06:14:48PM +0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote: > Hi > > On Tue, Dec 2, 2025 at 5:26 PM Geoffrey McRae <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > On 2025-12-02 23:44, Marc-André Lureau wrote: > > > Hi Geoffrey > > > > > > On Tue, Dec 2, 2025 at 4:31 PM Geoffrey McRae > > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > >> The PipeWire and PulseAudio backends are used by a large number of > > >> users > > >> in the VFIO community. Removing these would be an enormous determent > > >> to > > >> QEMU. > > > > > > They come with GStreamer pulse/pipe elements. > > > > Yes, but through another layer of abstraction/complexity with no real > > benefit. > > The benefit is that QEMU would not have to maintain 10 backends and > all the audio mixing/resampling.
Well, for open-source projects it depends on the maintainers: if they all shift their interrest/efforts toward a single GStreamer backend it will be a win (many devs maintaining a single backend). If they don't, we'd end-up with one backend maintained by one person. > The QEMU code would be simpler and > more maintainable overall. GStreamer has a clear pipeline design, > better suited (optimized code etc) and you can easily modify the > pipeline settings. > I don't know if it would be more maintainable. The idea is appealing, but to my experience, fixing audio glitches, timing issues, unexpected latency, subtle differences between OSes and alike have been painful compared to fixing similar code that uses the native APIs. My 2 cents.
