Sound support for Hurd and shortfalls of ALSA

[Damien Zammit]

Hi all,

I wish to begin a discussion around what would be
a fantastic design for sound support in Hurd.

One way to do it would be to port ALSA to Hurd userspace.
But I don't think that is a good idea:

I started a similar discussion among audio folks
who have been involved with the sound stack in Linux,
and we condensed the main flaws of ALSA down to a small document:  

https://github.com/linuxaudio/Linux-Audio-Workgroup/wiki/Towards-Fixing-ALSA

Please note that the above document is not just my own work, but has had
considerable input from a few audio experts who make their living
writing Free audio software.

I would like to know what the Hurd community thinks about this wiki,
and whether anyone would like to help me design and implement
a new server API for sound that will run in Hurd userspace,
without the existing flaws of the ALSA design.

No one seems interested to redesign one for Linux possibly because
it's too difficult to change the Linux kernel sound API and ALSA
is almost good enough for most purposes.

--

Damien Zammit
ZamAudio