On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 07:48:27PM -0400, Predrag Punosevac wrote: > A friend of mine who is an avid NetBSD user kept complaining about how > bad is audio on NetBSD. After getting sick of hearing complains, > I asked on OSS mailing lists about OSSv4 support for NetBSD and OpenBSD. > I actually got a very interesting answer > > http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3133 > > I recall OSS being discussed on this mailing list after OSS went > open source and changed the license. Can Jake or any other developers > in charge of audio on OpenBSD explain the issues involved in porting > OSSv4 to OpenBSD? >
Jacob explained why the job is technically hard for OSS devs. Also since ports don't use the OSSv4 API, it would be of limited usefulness. > I personally have fantastic experience with our audio but I would > think that OpenBSD could benefit at least from extra audio drivers. > Am I very wrong? Sorry for the noise. > in theory it could be possible to borrow certain OSS drivers and to tweak them to become part of our kernel. But: - if the sound card is not documented (OSS uses NDAs for certain drivers), we would take code that we don't understand and that we're unable to maintain, leading to low quality code. By doing this we indirectly support development model using NDAs, which is wrong. Not motivating for me. - for documented sound cards, we often already have drivers, and given the difference between our kernel internals and OSS internals, it's easier to just write our own driver. IMO the most important is to have quality support for _all_ integrated audio devices (azalia, ac97, cmpci) so audio just works and support few well-identified professional cards (envy, usb) for advanced applications. It's more about quality than supporting a lot of devices. -- Alexandre
