Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] alsa/usb
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Thu Jan 17 2002 - 19:24:45 EET
>What's going to happen with usb audio/midi support ?
>(Paul: I know what you think about usb in a professional environment but ...)
:)
>Since alsa should become the kernel standard driver for audio/midi/seq
>devices and all the work the usb people have done to support the audio
>class is based on the oss-api does that mean with 2.5 or 2.6 I'll no
>longer be able to use my usb midi interface (It's perfectly ok to use
>this little faderbaby to make pd usage a bit more interactive)
i don't know what i'm talking about here, but i don't see how they can
be based on OSS. when you use OSS, you use the POSIX API
(open/read/write/close/ioctl etc.) these translate into accesses to
device driver functions that are bound to the inode associated with
the file descriptor passed to them. that means that whatever device
driver controls the inode (say, /dev/midi or /dev/dsp) gets used to
handle the calls.
since the POSIX API is used, there's no way to route around this
(without LD_PRELOAD anyway). so my question is: are these drivers
actually part of OSS/Free (i.e. .../src/linux/drivers/char/sound), or
are they in a separate tree? if they are part of OSS, then ALSA
definitely has a problem here. if they are not part of OSS, then they
can continue to be used in the same way they are used now.
--p
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