[Mageia-dev] soundwrapper

Mon Mar 5 23:53:53 CET 2012

'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:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+