[Mageia-dev] soundwrapper

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and zezinho at 05/03/12 21:14 did gyre and gimble:
> maybe a silly question, but what is nowadays use of soundwrapper?
> 
> Some games still use it in the menu shortcut, while sound still works without 
> it for me with and without pulse... am I missing some specials configs?

It's been discussed several times on the list over the last few months,
but it's still needed (or rather desirable) for now.

Ultimately sound would still "work" even without pulse, but the problem
comes when trying to open the sound system from multiple apps. e.g. your
mail notifier may try to play an alert sound, or your desktop may try to
tell you that the battery level is critial while  you're playing your
full-screen game.

If the game uses OSS, it will get exclusive access to it when used with
the ALSA OSS modules.

Nowadays things work very different with PulseAudio enabled. It does not
use the ALSA OSS modules but instead emulates the /dev/dsp nodes via a
userspace character device emulation layer (CUSE) which in turn proxies
things directly to PulseAudio. This avoids the need for soundwrapper at
all and in fact the latest version of soundwrapper will be a NOP if it
detects osspd as running.

As I stated in mails a few weeks ago on this topic, it might make sense
to drop soundwrapper in mga3 if osspd can prove to work in all cases
where we want it. It would be a shame to see soundwrapper go and David
has done a great job with it over the years, but if it's no longer
needed then such is the way of things.

Time will tell however.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
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Open Source:
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  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/