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.
malloc()less feeder_volume. Informations can be retrieved dynamically
by doing table lookup on static data. Increase resolution from 6bit
to PCM_FXSHIFT (8bit) for better resolution and finer volume changes.
in every sense.
General
-------
- Multichannel safe, endian safe, format safe
* Large part of critical pcm filters such as vchan.c, feeder_rate.c,
feeder_volume.c, feeder_fmt.c and feeder.c has been rewritten so that
using them does not cause the pcm data to be converted to 16bit little
endian.
* Macrosses for accessing pcm data safely are defined within sound.h in
the form of PCM_READ_* / PCM_WRITE_*
* Currently, most of them are probably limited for mono/stereo handling,
but the future addition of true multichannel will be much easier.
- Low latency operation
* Well, this require lot more works to do not just within sound driver,
but we're heading towards right direction. Buffer/block sizing within
channel.c is rewritten to calculate precise allocation for various
combination of sample/data/rate size. As a result, applying correct
SNDCTL_DSP_POLICY value will achive expected latency behaviour simmilar
to what commercial 4front driver do.
* Signal handling fix. ctrl+c of "cat /dev/zero > /dev/dsp" does not
result long delay.
* Eliminate sound truncation if the sound data is too small.
DIY:
1) Download / extract
http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/lowlatency/shortfiles.tar.gz
2) Do a comparison between "cat state*.au > /dev/dsp" and
"for x in state*.au ; do cat $x > /dev/dsp ; done"
- there should be no "perceivable" differences.
Double close for PR kern/31445.
CAVEAT: Low latency come with (unbearable) price especially for poorly
written applications. Applications that trying to act smarter
by requesting (wrong) blocksize/blockcount will suffer the most.
Fixup samples/patches can be found at:
http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/ports/
- Switch minimum/maximum sampling rate limit to "1" and "2016000" (48k * 42)
due to closer compatibility with 4front driver.
Discussed with: marcus@ (long time ago?)
- All driver specific sysctls in the form of "hw.snd.pcm%d.*" have been
moved to their own dev sysctl nodes, notably:
hw.snd.pcm%d.vchans -> dev.pcm.%d.vchans
Bump __FreeBSD_version.
Driver specific
---------------
- Ditto for sysctls.
- snd_atiixp, snd_es137x, snd_via8233, snd_hda
* Numerous cleanups and fixes.
* _EXPERIMENTAL_ polling mode support using simple callout_* mechanisme.
This was intended for pure debugging and latency measurement, but proven
good enough in few unexpected and rare cases (such as problematic shared
IRQ with GIANT devices - USB). Polling can be enabled/disabled through
dev.pcm.0.polling. Disabled by default.
- snd_ich
* Fix possible overflow during speed calibration. Delay final
initialization (pcm_setstatus) after calibration finished.
PR: kern/100169
Tested by: Kevin Overman <oberman@es.net>
* Inverted EAPD for few Nec VersaPro.
PR: kern/104715
Submitted by: KAWATA Masahiko <kawata@mta.biglobe.ne.jp>
Thanks to various people, notably Joel Dahl, Yuriy Tsibizov, Kevin Oberman,
those at #freebsd-azalia @ freenode and others for testing.
Joel Dahl will do the manpage update.
