Re: Re (2): Sound on sun4c
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On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 peter_easthope@gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca wrote:
> Ben, Ian & others,
>
> I still do not understand how Ben got
> the OSS API on his Sparc.
>
> it> /dev/sndstat has always been there in OSS/Free.
>
> Is OSS/Free installed with Debian Sparc
> 2.2.19 and just waiting to be configured?
> If so, where do I begin.
No, it would appear that OSS/Free (and most likely the commercial OSS too)
really only supports PC sound cards. For Sparc machines we have a
seperate SparcAudio subsystem, and it lives in drivers/sbus/audio/ in the kernel
source. It supports AMD-7930, CS-4231, and DBRI sound hardware, which seems
to cover most or all SparcStation boxes. Like I said in my other post,
SparcAudio does not cover the complete OSS interface. You don't get
/dev/sndstat, but /dev/dsp /dev/audio and /dev/mixer all work. So pretty much
any OSS-compatible software should work, baring perhaps endian issues.
I don't think /dev/sndstat was ever used by any program anyway. Shell
scripts, maybe. Basically it was just a simple mechanism for users to check
their sound driver setup. Since the sound hardware is built into SparcStations,
there's very little to screw up.
> The only sound API I see in the dselect
> list is ALSA. If there is no API already
> in this system, ALSA would appear to be
> appropriate.
No, just load the sparcaudio modules or compile a kernel with them. I've always
relied on my own compiled kernels so I don't really know what's included with
the supplied kernels and modules.
Now ALSA would be interesting to get working on Sparc. I gather that almost all
developement (apart from absolutely necessary maintainance work) on OSS/Free has
ceased; pretty much everyone's moved over to ALSA for quite a while. Especially
work on the newer whiz-bang PCI sound cards, which is the whole reason why ALSA
came about in the first place. ALSA recently went into Linus' 2.5 kernel I
believe.
The existing SparcAudio drivers don't appear to be that big and it might not
take too much work to port them over to the ALSA framework. But audio isn't too
important on the old Sparc's, so don't hold your breath. Sorry.
bye
- --
8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------
Ian Tester *8)# \7\ LINUX: because geeks will find a way
imroy@zipworld.com.au \7\ http://www.zipworld.com.au/~imroy
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