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.
- Rework the entire pcm_channel structure:
* Remove rarely used link placeholder, instead, make each pcm_channel
as head/link of each own/each other. Unlock - Lock sequence due to
sleep malloc has been reduced.
* Implement "busy" queue which will contain list of busy/active
channels. This greatly reduce locking contention for example while
servicing interrupt for hardware with many channels or when virtual
channels reach its 256 peak channels.
- So I heard you like v chan ... O RLY?
Welcome to Virtual **Record** Channels (vrec, rec vchans, vchans for
recording, Rec-Chan, you decide), the ultimate solutions for your
nagging O_RDWR full-duplex wannabe (note: flash plugins) monopolizing
single record channel causing EBUSY. Vrec works exactly like Vchans
(or, should I rename it to "Vplay" :) , except that it operates on the
opposite direction (recording). Up to 256 vrecs (like vchans) are
possible.
Notes:
* Relocate dev.pcm.%d.{vchans,vchanformat,vchanrate} to each of its
respective node/direction:
dev.pcm.%d.play.* for "play" (cdev = dsp%d.vp%d)
dev.pcm.%d.rec.* for "record" (cdev = dsp%d.vr%d)
* Don't expect that it will magically give you ability to split
"recording source" (eg: 1 channel for cdrom, 1 channel for mic,
etc). Just admit that you only have a *single* recording source /
channel. Please bug your hardware vendor instead :)
- Bump maxautovchans from 4 to 16. For a full-fledged multimedia
desktop/workstation with too many soundservers installed (esound,
artsd, jackd, pulse/polypaudio, ding-dong pling plong mudkip fuh fuh,
etc), 4 seems inadequate. There will be no memory penalty here, since
virtual channels are allocate only by demand.
- Nuke/Rework the entire statically created cdev entries. Everything is
clonable through snd own clone manager which designed to withstand many
kind of abusive devfs droids such as:
* while : ; do /bin/test -e /dev/dsp ; done
* jot 16777216 0 | while read x ; do ls /dev/dsp0.$x ; done
* hundreds (could be thousands) concurrent threads/process opening
"/dev/dsp" (previously, this might result EBUSY even with just
3 contesting threads/procs).
o Reusable clone objects (instead of creating new one like there's no
tomorrow) after certain expiration deadline. The clone allocator will
decide whether to reuse, share, or creating new clone.
o Automatic garbage collector.
- Dynamic unit magic allocator. Maximum attached soundcards can be tuned
using tunable "hw.snd.maxunit" (Default to 512). Minimum is 16, and
maximum is 2048.
- ..other fixes, mostly related to concurrency issues.
joel@ will do the manpage updates on sound(4).
Have fun.
* add new channels to the end of the list so channels used in order of
addition
* de-globalise definition of struct snddev_info and provide accessor
functions where necessary.
* move the $FreeBSD$ tag in each .c file into a macro and allow the
/dev/sndstat handler to display these when set to maximum verbosity to aid
debugging.
* allow each device to register its own sndstat handler to reduce the amount
of groping sndstat must do in foreign structs.
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.
