On Tue, 23.09.08 10:23, Alan Cox (alan(a)redhat.com) wrote:
> In short: how modern software wants to drive a sound card has
changed
> quite a bit. And OSS3 is from the early 90's. So it's focussed on
> hardware, and it is focussed on hw and sw from 20y ago. An SB16 is
> quite different from a modern HDA sound card.
Not vastly, its a DMA pipe with a DAC on the end
There's not necessarily a DAC at "the end" anymore. Could be SPDIF
too.
And if you say that a modern sound card behaves very similarly to early
90's sound card because it ues DMA, then you could say that sound card
is very similar to a harddisk, too. Which is definitely true in a way.
The really interesting part of audio is not the data transfer, it's
the timing. And that's where hardware changed. And software too. And
OSS is broken and legacy.
Lennart
--
Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553
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