Release notes for Open Source OSS version v4.1test0-070717 ============= What is the open sourced version -------------------------------- It is an open source version of the Open Sound System (OSS) sound subsystem software released under the GPL license. The only difference to the "binary" version of OSS is that few drivers made by 3rd parties (mostly for professional high end devices) have been omitted because 4Front Technologies doesn't own the copyrights to this code. The same is true with few audio enhancement effects that are not important to the functionality of OSS. There are two source packages released by 4Front Technologies. The official package is released under GPLv2 and it contains the OS interfaces for all supported operating systems. Another version is released under the CDDL license but it contains only the Solaris and BSD specific parts (the same files may also be included in the OpenSolaris source distribution). Please use the GPL version if you are going to make any changes to OSS (even if you are doing development for Solaris/OpenSolaris or BSD). The CDDL version will be produced from the GPLed source tree using an automated tool. We cannot accept any contributions based on the CDDL source tree. Note that while the GPL package contains sources for all the operating systems the GPL license is not compatible with any closed source operating systems. This means that you will need to purchase a commercial license from 4Front Technologies to use OSS legally with such operating systems. See www.opensound.com for more information about OSS. Our developer web site (http://developer.opensound.com) will give additional information for application developers and OSS contributors. NOTICE! In general it is not possible to mix binary modules from the retail OSS package with remainder of the software compiled from open source OSS sources because certain heased files and core data structures are incompatible. If you need to use one of the drivers missing from the open source version you will have to use the retail version of OSS instead. However there is one special case where you can mix modules from the open source version with some modules from the retail one. You need to make sure you are using exactly the source package that matches the retail version (see www.opensound.com for more info). In (and only in) this case you can check the right compile time stamp (YYYYMMDDhhmm) from /dev/sndstat and then edit the timestamp.h files (there may be one or two of them) after running the configure script. Set the define for osdev_create to have the right time stamp and build/install the open source version on top of the previously installed retail version. This method is not officially supported by 4Front technologies because even minor differences in the key structures may crash the syetem. In particular do not modify any of the "global" header files if ysing this approach. Build system requirements ------------------------- To be able to extract the source files from the tarball you will beed the bunzip2 command in the system. It's usually available by default but otherwise you will need to download the sources from the net and compile it. OSS is currently compatible with the following operating systems and processor architectures. Other environments may be supported later. Operating system Version Processor architecture Sun Solaris 10 or later x86, amd64, Sparc (64 bit) Sun OpenSolaris NV11 or later x86, amd64, Sparc (64 bit) Linux 2.6.11 or later x86, x86_64 FreeBSD 5.4 or later x86, x86_64 SCO UnixWare 7 or later x86 SCO OpenServer 6 or later x86 The system used to build OSS should have full kernel/driver development environment installed (C/C++ compiler, linker, make, kernel headers, etc). Please refer to the documentation of the operating system you are using Under Linux and FreeBSD the C compiler to use is GCC (_MUST_ be v3.0 or later). With the other operating systems you need to use the C compiler provided by the operating system vendor. In addition GNU awk needs to be available in the system as gwak. Otherwise the manual pages will not be created correctly (otherwise OSS will compile and work OK). Target system requirements -------------------------- OSS can be installed in a different computer system than where the software was compiled (OTOH in many cases these systems are the same machine). Under Linux and FreeBSD some parts of the software need to be compiled in the target system to handle differences between different kernel versions. For this reason it's necessary to have a functional kernel development system installed in the target machine too. In FreeBSD this is the default. Under Linux systems the target machine should have the following packages installed (unfortunatgely they are not installed by default. - Kernel sources and/or headers for the currently active kernel. In most Linux distributions this package is called kernel-sourcce or kernel-devel. - C compiler (gcc) version that was used to compile the kernel. - GNU make. - GNU binutils. - GNU awk (gawk) - Standard C library (libc/glibc) headers. - GTK+ (version 1.2.x for Solaris and Unixware and version 2.x for others) Source directory structure -------------------------- The directory scheme of OSS is different from most other software packages. Instead of storing source files in the "build" tree we have separated the build (object) directory from the source directory. In this way the sources can be located in a common directory on a (NFS) server and shared between several "build" machines possibly running different operating systems. Any number of build machines can be used to compile OSS at the same time without disturbing each other. However nothing prevents having the source directory located in the local machine or even on CD-ROM or some other read-only media. There is nothing special in the source directory. It's contents are distributed in the source tarball (oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl.tar.bz2). The build directory is a special directory that contains symbolic links to the corresponding files in the source directory. Files in the build directory can be edited and the changes will be directed to the original file in the source directory (provided that it's writeable). However the object files will only be created in the local build directory only. Note that there is also some C code (.c and .inc files) that are not built in the source system but in the target. These files are located in the setup/`uname`/oss directory. This is necessary because certain kernel data structures depend on the kernel version being installed in the target system. The goal of this mechanism is that majority of the code can be compiled in any system. Only the kernel version dependent parts (wrappers) need to be compiled in the target system (this mechanism will become unnecessary in the future when these operating systems (Linux in particular) get a proper device driver interface. Installing the sources ---------------------- Save the tarball containing the source files in /tmp (or some other directory in the development system). In this document we will assume that you have stored the sources in /tmp/oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl.tar.bz2. Go to the directory where you would like to create the source directory. For example: cd /usr/src Next restore the files in the tarball by executing the following command: bunzip2 -c /tmp/oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - (Or if you have GNU make (Linux, FreeBSD) you simply use tar xvfj /tmp/oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl.tar.bz2). After restoring the files they will appear in the oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl subdirectory under the current directory. Note! bunzip2 command is part of the bzip2 package. Creating the build environment ------------------------------ If you have an earlier OSS build directory in the system it's recommended that you remove it before creating the build directory for v4.1test0-070717 alternatively you may create separate build directories for different OSS versions. Before you can build OSS you will need to create an empty "build" directory and run the configure script. This as well as the actual compile/build step can be done by any user (ie super user capabilities are not required). The build directory can be located anywhere (say in your home directory). However the directory must be completely empty (no files in it). For example you can create and initialize the build directory in the following way (assuming that the source directory is /usr/src/$TARGETDIR): mkdir oss cd oss /usr/src/$TARGETDIR/configure The configure script will perform slightly different steps depending on the current operating system. SCO Open Server and SCO UnixWare are regarded as the same plattform and the same OSS package will work under both of them. Solaris environment differs from the other operating systems because the same build will compile both 32 and 64 bit drivers. So there will be two almost identical subdirectory trees (i386 and amd64) under Solaris. Some drivers only work under x86 or certain operating systems. For this reason not all drivers will get compiled in some environments. Compiling OSS ------------- You can compile OSS by running make under the build directory. This will only compile the C source files to binary objects but doesn't actually build the installable files. There are few make targets that are used to build the software in different ways: make build: This command compiles the binaries and runs the ./build.sh script (OS dependent) to create the full prototype tree (./prototype). This directory contains a copy of the files to be installed in the target system (relative to the / directory). make install: This command does "make build" and then copies the files/directories located in the ./prototype subdirectory to their proper places (under /). After that the script performs the (OS dependent) steps required to install the drivers in the local system. It may be necessary to run soundoff and soundon to reload the drivers in the kernel after running "make install". This method is a fast way to recompile and install OSS in the system when hacking with the drivers. However it's necessary to create the proper installation package and install it when installing a new OSS version for the first time. make package: This command will compile the OSS software and buil a proper installation package (.rpm, .pkg or something else depending on the operating system). This package (from the local directory) can then be installed in the target system (local computer or somewhere else) using the usual software installation and management tools (pkgadd/pkgrm, rpm) provided by the operating system. Notice that this command may not work properly in all Linux systems because most Linux distributions are incompatible with each other. So the files/scripts used to create the RPM package may need to be edited if you are using any other distribution than SuSE or Redhat/Fedora. In particular Debian style package management is not supported. If you are installing OSS in a noncompatible system you will have to use "make install" (or to move the files using a tar package and then run the install script (cd /usr/lib/oss/build;sh install.sh). Summary: (This is how we build OSS at 4front) --------------------------------------------- 1) cd /usr/src; tar -jxvf oss-v4.1test0-070717-src-gpl.tar.bz2 2) mkdir /usr/src/oss; cd /usr/src/oss 3) /usr/src/$TARGETDIR/configure 4) make install This step compiles the software and copies the files to their right places. Finally it starts the drivers using the soundon script. Installing the compiled (binary) package in the target system ------------------------------------------------------------- After running make package the install package (.pkg/.rpm) will be created in the build directory. This package can be moved to the target system and installed using the pkgadd or rpm commands. Managing OSS installation ------------------------- OSS can be started and stopped by using the soundon and soundoff commands (respectively). Soundon will create a log file (/usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log) that contains debugging information that helps in solving problems with OSS. Installing the OSS package will also install a startup script (usually /etc/rc3.d/S89oss) that will start OSS automatically when the system gets rebooted. So running soundoff or soundon is manually is rarely necessary. Information about the devices in the system can be printed using the ossinfo command (ossinfo -v3 for most detailed output). When new hardware is installed in ths system it is usually necessary to run the ossdetect utility (ossdetect -v for verbose output) to find the new devices in the system. After running ossdetect you will need to run soundoff and soundon to reload the drivers (not necessary under Solaris). Configuration options --------------------- The /usr/lib/oss/conf directory will contain various configuration files (or actually symbolic links to the actual files in system dependent directories). These files can be edited using any text editor to change the settings. However there is rarely need to change these settings. You need to run soundoff and soundon to make the config option changes to take effect. Under SCO OpenServer and UnixWare you will also need to run the following commands _before_ doing soundoff;soundon: cd /usr/lib/oss/build sh install.sh Developing OSS compatible applications -------------------------------------- The OSS API is documented in the OSS Programmer's Guide (http://manuals.opensound.com/developer). Making modifications to Open Sound System ----------------------------------------- If you plan to make modifications to Open Sound System, please check our developer web site (http://developer.opensound.com) before doing anything. Also it's recommended that you join the oss-devel mailing list and describe the changes you are planning to do. We will accept contributions to the code. However there are certain rules the contributions must follow before they can be accepted. First of all the contributions must not cause any compatibility problems between different OSS versions. Also changes that may increase complexity of the OSS API or could cause incompatibilities between devices will probably not be accepted.