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.
confusions and panic provided that the following conditions are met:
1) WITNESS is enabled (watch/trace).
2) Using modules, instead of statically linked (Not a strict
requirement, but easier to reproduce this way).
3) 2 or more modules share the same mtx type ("sound softc").
- They might share the same name (strcmp() == 0), but it always
point to different address.
4) Repetitive kldunload/load on any module that shares the same mtx
type (Not a strict requirement, but easier to reproduce this way).
Consider module A and module B:
- From enroll() - subr_witness.c:
* Load module A. Everything seems fine right now.
wA-w_refcount == 1 ; wA-w_name = "sound softc"
* Load module B.
* w->w_name == description will always fail.
("sound softc" from A and B point to different address).
* wA->w_refcount > 0 && strcmp(description, wA->w_name) == 0
* enroll() will return wA instead of returning (possibly unique)
wB.
wA->w_refcount++ , == 2.
* Unload module A, mtx_destroy(), wA->w_name become invalid,
but wA->w_refcount-- become 1 instead of 0. wA will not be
removed from witness list.
* Some other places call mtx_init(), iterating witness list,
found wA, failed on wA->w_name == description
* wA->w_refcount > 0 && strcmp(description, wA->w_name)
* Panic on strcmp() since wA->w_name no longer point to valid
address.
Note that this could happened in other places as well, not just sound
(eg. consider lots of drivers that share simmilar MTX_NETWORK_LOCK).
Solutions (for sound case):
1) Provide unique mtx type string for each mutex creation (chosen)
or
2) Put "sound softc" global variable somewhere and use it.
sparc64 GENERIC and the sound device drivers known working on sparc64
to use bus_get_dma_tag() to obtain the parent DMA tag so we can get rid
of the sparc64_root_dma_tag kludge eventually. Except for ath(4), sk(4),
stge(4) and ti(4) these changes are runtime tested (unless I booted up
the wrong kernels again...).
on UltraSPARC workstations. The driver is based on OpenBSD's SBus
cs4231 driver and heavily modified to incorporate into sound(4)
infrastructure. Due to the lack of APCDMA documentation, the DMA
code of SBus cs4231 came from OpenBSD's driver.
The driver runs without Giant lock and supports both SBus and EBus
based CS4231 audio controller. Special thanks to marius for providing
feedbacks during the driver writing. His feedback made it possible
to write hiccup free playback code under high system loads.
Approved by: jake (mentor)
Reviewed by: marius (initial version)
Tested by: marius, kwm, Julian C. Dunn(jdunn AT opentrend DOT net)
