F11: OSS and pulseaudio conflict

Bastien Nocera bnocera at redhat.com
Fri Nov 14 22:42:29 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 11:11 -0500, Warren Togami wrote:
> I ran into an application yesterday that seemed to make pulseaudio
> daemon fail.  After a lot of digging, someone else realized that this
> application was actually using OSS output.  OSS currently grabs /dev/dsp
> (provided by snd-pcm-oss), making it appear that pulseaudio has "failed".
> 
> OSS applications are so rare these days, I did not even consider that it
> was using OSS.  This is likely to be a rare but repetitive source of
> confusion in the future.

Just remove OSS support from the kernel. ALSA has been the default since
the 2.6.0 kernel (that's 5 years ago), and even apps that use OSS
emulation through ALSA will block any other use of the sound card
(whether PulseAudio is present or not).

There's no sound mixing (through ALSA or PulseAudio) when OSS emulation
is used in ALSA. Kill it (and file a bug against the app).




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