[pulseaudio-discuss] Google ChromeOS reinventing the wheel, ignoring PulseAudio

[pierre-louis.bossart at linux.intel.com]

> I am indeed the one doing the majority of the work on the ADHD system at
> present, and I can answer questions about it.  As a bit of background,
> PulseAudio was attempted for a while before my time on the Chromium OS
> project.  The results for some of the hardware we have were not very
> inspiring -- at idle, I was told Pulse would take 30% of the CPU.  So,
> Pulse
> was removed, and the sound system sat for a long while.  The guy
> originally
> in charge of sound decided to work on something else and I took the
> responsibility.

well that's too bad. I provided some pointers/patches to your colleagues
over the summer... Most of the issues with high CPU utilization come from
either resampling or bad latency configurations. With the relevant
settings PulseAudio is actually fairly efficient.

> gavd will maintain information about the currently installed hardware and
> provide that information to Chrome, and Chrome will probably end up making
> the policy decisions about the output device to use, maybe based on some
> type of input from the user.

This is not incompatible with PulseAudio, Nokia had a similar solution
with external Ohm modules to handle high-level device detection/policy,
and PulseAudio handling the actual low-level routing/mixing.
-Pierre