For a slightly thorough explaination, please refer to
[1] http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html .
Summary of changes includes:
1 Volume Per-Channel (vpc). Provides private / standalone volume control
unique per-stream pcm channel without touching master volume / pcm.
Applications can directly use SNDCTL_DSP_[GET|SET][PLAY|REC]VOL, or for
backwards compatibility, SOUND_MIXER_PCM through the opened dsp device
instead of /dev/mixer. Special "bypass" mode is enabled through
/dev/mixer which will automatically detect if the adjustment is made
through /dev/mixer and forward its request to this private volume
controller. Changes to this volume object will not interfere with
other channels.
Requirements:
- SNDCTL_DSP_[GET|SET][PLAY|REC]_VOL are newer ioctls (OSSv4) which
require specific application modifications (preferred).
- No modifications required for using bypass mode, so applications
like mplayer or xmms should work out of the box.
Kernel hints:
- hint.pcm.%d.vpc (0 = disable vpc).
Kernel sysctls:
- hw.snd.vpc_mixer_bypass (default: 1). Enable or disable /dev/mixer
bypass mode.
- hw.snd.vpc_autoreset (default: 1). By default, closing/opening
/dev/dsp will reset the volume back to 0 db gain/attenuation.
Setting this to 0 will preserve its settings across device
closing/opening.
- hw.snd.vpc_reset (default: 0). Panic/reset button to reset all
volume settings back to 0 db.
- hw.snd.vpc_0db (default: 45). 0 db relative to linear mixer value.
2 High quality fixed-point Bandlimited SINC sampling rate converter,
based on Julius O'Smith's Digital Audio Resampling -
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/resample/. It includes a filter design
script written in awk (the clumsiest joke I've ever written)
- 100% 32bit fixed-point, 64bit accumulator.
- Possibly among the fastest (if not fastest) of its kind.
- Resampling quality is tunable, either runtime or during kernel
compilation (FEEDER_RATE_PRESETS).
- Quality can be further customized during kernel compilation by
defining FEEDER_RATE_PRESETS in /etc/make.conf.
Kernel sysctls:
- hw.snd.feeder_rate_quality.
0 - Zero-order Hold (ZOH). Fastest, bad quality.
1 - Linear Interpolation (LINEAR). Slightly slower than ZOH,
better quality but still does not eliminate aliasing.
2 - (and above) - Sinc Interpolation(SINC). Best quality. SINC
quality always start from 2 and above.
Rough quality comparisons:
- http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/z_comparison/
3 Bit-perfect mode. Bypasses all feeder/dsp effects. Pure sound will be
directly fed into the hardware.
4 Parametric (compile time) Software Equalizer (Bass/Treble mixer). Can
be customized by defining FEEDER_EQ_PRESETS in /etc/make.conf.
5 Transparent/Adaptive Virtual Channel. Now you don't have to disable
vchans in order to make digital format pass through. It also makes
vchans more dynamic by choosing a better format/rate among all the
concurrent streams, which means that dev.pcm.X.play.vchanformat/rate
becomes sort of optional.
6 Exclusive Stream, with special open() mode O_EXCL. This will "mute"
other concurrent vchan streams and only allow a single channel with
O_EXCL set to keep producing sound.
Other Changes:
* most feeder_* stuffs are compilable in userland. Let's not
speculate whether we should go all out for it (save that for
FreeBSD 16.0-RELEASE).
* kobj signature fixups, thanks to Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org>
* pull out channel mixing logic out of vchan.c and create its own
feeder_mixer for world justice.
* various refactoring here and there, for good or bad.
* activation of few more OSSv4 ioctls() (see [1] above).
* opt_snd.h for possible compile time configuration:
(mostly for debugging purposes, don't try these at home)
SND_DEBUG
SND_DIAGNOSTIC
SND_FEEDER_MULTIFORMAT
SND_FEEDER_FULL_MULTIFORMAT
SND_FEEDER_RATE_HP
SND_PCM_64
SND_OLDSTEREO
Manual page updates are on the way.
Tested by: joel, Olivier SMEDTS <olivier at gid0 d org>, too many
unsung / unnamed heroes.
channel.c/channel_if.m:
- Macros cleanups, prefer inlined min() over MIN().
- Rework chn_read()/chn_write() for better dead interrupt detection
policy. Reduce scheduling overhead by doing pure 5 seconds sleep
before giving up, instead of several cycle of brute micro sleeping.
- Avoid calling wakeup_one() for non-sleeping channel (for example,
vchan parent channel).
- EWOULDBLOCK -> EAGAIN.
- Fix possible divide-by-zero panic on chn_sync().
- Re-enforce ^2 blocksize policy, since there are too many broken
userland apps that blindly assume it without even trying to do
serious calculations.
- New channel method - CHANNEL_SETFRAGMENTS(), a refined version of
CHANNEL_SETBLOCKSIZE(). It accept _both_ blocksize and blockcount
arguments, so the driver internals will have better hints for
buffering and timing calculations.
- Hook FEEDER_SWAPLR into feederchain building process.
feeder_fmt.c:
- Unified version of various filters, avoiding duplications.
- malloc()less feeder_fmt. Informations can be retrieved dynamically
by doing table lookup on static data. For cases such as converting
from stereo to mono or reducing bit depth where input data is larger
than output, cycle remaining available free space until it has been
exhausted and start kicking 8 bytes reservoir space from there to
complete the remaining requested count.
- Introduce FEEDER_SWAPLR. Few super broken hardwares (found on several
extremely cheap uaudio stick, possibly others) mistakenly wired left
and right channels wrongly, screwing output or input.
The goal was to sync with the OSSv4 API 4Front Technologies uses in their
proprietary OSS driver. This was successful as far as possible. The part
of the API which is stable is implemented, for the rest there are some
stubs already.
New system ioctls:
- SNDCTL_SYSINFO - obtain audio system info (version, # of audio/midi/
mixer devices, etc.)
- SNDCTL_AUDIOINFO - fetch details about a specific audio device
- SNDCTL_MIXERINFO - fetch details about a specific mixer device
New audio ioctls:
- Sync groups (SNDCTL_DSP_SYNCGROUP/SNDCTL_DSP_SYNCSTART) which allow
triggered playback/recording on multiple devices (even across processes
simultaneously).
- Peak meters (SNDCTL_DSP_GETIPEAKS/SNDCTL_DSP_GETOPEAKS) - can query
audio drivers for peak levels (needs driver support, disabled for now).
- Per channel playback/recording levels -
SNDCTL_DSP_{GET,SET}{PLAY,REC}VOL. Note that these are still in name
only, just wrapping around the AC97-style mixer at the moment. The next
step is to push them down to the drivers.
Audio ioctls still under development by 4Front (for which stubs may exist
in this commit):
- SNDCTL_GETNAME, SNDCTL_{GET,SET}{SONG,LABEL}
- SNDCTL_DSP_{GET,SET}_CHNORDER
- SNDCTL_MIX_ENUMINFO, SNDCTL_MIX_EXTINFO - (might be documented enough in
the OSS releases to work on this. These ioctls cover the cool "twiddle
any knob on your card" features.)
Missing:
- SNDCTL_DSP_COOKEDMODE -- this ioctl is used to give applications direct
access to a card's buffers, bypassing the feeder architecture. It's
a toughy -- "someone" needs to decide :
(a) if this is desireable, and (b) if it's reasonably feasible.
Updates for driver writers:
So far, only two routines to the channel class (in channel_if.m) are added.
One is for fetching a list of discrete supported playback/recording rates
of a channel, and the other is for fetching peak level info (useful for
drawing peak meters). Interested parties may want to help pushing down
SNDCTL_DSP_{GET,SET}{PLAY,REC}VOL into the drivers.
To use the new stuff you need to rebuild the sound drivers or your kernel
(depending on if you use modules or not) and to install soundcard.h (a
buildworld/installworld handles this).
Sponsored by: Google SoC 2006
Submitted by: ryanb
Many thanks to: 4Front Technologies for their cooperation, explanations
and the nice license of their soundcard.h.
instead of using two malloced arrays for storing channel lists, use an
slist. convert the sndstat device to use sbufs and optionally provide more
detail about channel state.
vchans are software mixed playback channels. they are not enabled by this
commit. they use the feeder infrastructure to emulate normal playback
channels in a manner transparent to applications, whilst providing as many
channels are desired, especially suitable for devices with only one hardware
playback channel. in the future they will provide additional features.
those wishing to test this functionality will need to add vchan.c to
sys/conf/files and use 'sysctl -w hw.snd.pcm0.vchans' to enable it.
blocksize and auto-rate selection are not yet supported.
this introduces a new buffering mechanism which results in dramatic
simplification of the channel manager.
as several structures have changed, we take the opportunity to move their
definitions into the source files where they are used, make them private and
de-typedef them.
the sound drivers are updated to use snd_setup_intr instead of
bus_setup_intr, and to comply with the de-typedefed structures.
the ac97, mixer and channel layers have been updated with finegrained
locking, as have some drivers- not all though. the rest will follow soon.
this gives us several benefits, including:
* easier extensibility- new optional methods can be added to
ac97/mixer/channel classes without having to fixup every driver.
* forward compatibility for drivers, provided no new mandatory methods are
added.
