On Aug 11, 2009, at 9:24 PM, Russ Cox wrote:
It's hard to do the low-level hardware stuff outside
the kernel. It's possible, but it's a lot easier inside.
Just keep the inside simple.
I've done audio on a handful of operating systems
and all I ever want to do with the card is set it up
to play X kHz 16-bit little-endian PCM stereo and
then control the volume. The rest can be done from
user space. This is exactly what Plan 9's audio
driver already does, and I wish the others were so
simple.
This sounds like exactly the kind of thing one wants
from an audio driver for playback. For recording things
get slightly more complicated.
Even for playback if you want to do passthrough (via
SPDIF or some such) things get slightly more complicated.
Of course, one can disregard passthrough as not
being an audio at all, but rather a datalink issue.
It may have had something to do with making a snazzy low-bandwidth
import-across-the-network demo too.
Personally, I'd place my bet on this explanation. ;-)
Thanks,
Roman.
