[pulseaudio-discuss] ALSA pulse plugin & SND_PCM_ACCESS_MMAP_INTERLEAVED

Lennart Poettering lennart at poettering.net
Mon Sep 3 10:02:02 PDT 2007


On Mon, 27.08.07 22:47, Nikita V. Youshchenko (yoush at cs.msu.su) wrote:

> > It's always the same issue. We cannot reliably emulate mmap'ed audio
> > device access. Neither with ALSA nor with OSS.
> >
> > It's not a problem specific to PA. It's the same issue with almost any
> > non-hw driver for libasound.
> 
> May I be a bit currious and ask why?
> Isn't mmap'ed device just a buffer where application writes data, and audio 
> driver picks data from (or vice-versa for capture)?

No, traditionally you get direct access to the hw playback buffer by
mmaping it. I.e. the PCI memory is directly mapped into your process
memory. For devices like USB however this works differently and the
buffer you mmap is merely a bounce buffer which is than used to pass
the data to the USB controller.

Hmm, but actually you are right, the ALSA mmap API is a lot more
flexible than the OSS mmap API and would allow proper emulation for
PA. I've added this to my TODO list now. 

The problem with OSS mmap is that it lacks commit/begin and also
silently assumes that there is no further latency between the mmap
buffer in the actual speakers -- which is obviously never true on a
sound server, and not even on normal hw, where additional filters
usually delay output a couple of samples. However, ALSA exports
latency information about that, so this might indeed be fixable
cleanly for our pa plugin for libasound.

So in summary: OSS mmap can only be used sensibly for PCI and ISA hw
devices. ALSA is much more flexible and can use mmaping as a flexible
zero-copy data transfer method.

> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2007-January/msg00080.html

Yes, I know. Monty is actually a collegue of mine.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4



More information about the pulseaudio-discuss mailing list