Disable OSS sound by default in Fedora 11, compat-broken-oss-sound

Warren Togami wtogami at redhat.com
Tue Feb 24 23:29:40 UTC 2009


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472741#c12
Here is an improved plan to disable OSS by default in Fedora 11.  This
plan makes it possible to restore the old behavior with a single compat
package.  This will prevent the pulseaudio/OSS conflict that currently
causes weird behavior and mistaken bug reports filed against numerous
other packages.

This should also encourage us to fix the few remaining applications that
output OSS by default.

Proposal
========
1) Keep the OSS kernel modules.
2) Remove all snd-oss* lines from /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.dist.
3) (We might want to put blacklist snd-oss* lines into
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio?  Will this be needed or helpful at all?)
4) Put the lines removed in #2 into a new package called
compat-broken-oss-sound.  This package conflicts with
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.
5) Release notes say OSS is DISABLED BY DEFAULT.  All applications
should switch to ALSA or pulseaudio output.  As a backup measure,
OSS-only applications can use padsp to emulate an OSS device, which
works for most applications.

If we are going to do this, we should do it soon before F11 Beta.

FAQ
===
1) Why is it called compat-broken-oss-sound?
OSS causes broken behavior in combination with pulseaudio.
OSS completely blocks sound from other applications.
We want the package name to suggest there is something wrong if you need
to use it.

2) Why can't we simply blacklist?
It doesn't work due to the install lines.  The install lines need to be
removed.

3) How does OSS conflict with pulseaudio?
OSS grabs the entire sound device, causing pulseaudio to get stuck.
Applications attempting to output via pulseaudio themselves get stuck
and sometimes crash.  This behavior is very non-obvious and often
pulseaudio or the application is blamed instead of OSS.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com




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