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

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:29:03AM -0700, Taylor Hutt wrote:

> In this case, I am part of a team working to make a shipping product, and
> there are time constraints which
> do not afford the time necessary to do that, _and_ to make forward progress
> to get the sound system working
> across a constantly increasing variety of hardware.

> The door has not categorically closed on Pulse for all time, but it has
> closed for the time being.
> We've got a lot of work to get Chromium and Chromium OS to a point where
> ship with the desired features, and
> I don't presently have the time to re-investigate Pulse across our set of
> hardware.

Oh dear, that's unfortunate - it's a shame nobody said anything when the
original problems were encountered :( .  Hopefully someone from the
wider community will be able to find time to reinvestigate this in the
future.

Actually, I did have a brief look just now and it looks relatively
non-invasive and hence tractable to deploy usage of the DSP/PCM side of
things so long as all the parts of PulseAudio that manage hardware
configuration and routing changes are disabled (so it just ends up
deferring all the management to something else and just dealing with
optimizing the DMA and any mixing/volume it gets asked to do).  This is
roughly how PulseAudio was initially rolled out on the distros.  Like I
say hopefully someone will find time to give it a try, possibly worth
considering as a summer of code type project.