Hannu’s Blog

I have spent couple of days in testing Boomer (prerelease version) with applications that are known to work fine with OSS. This includes the utilities (ossplay, ossinfo, osstest, ossmix and ossxmix) that are shipped with OSS. I have also tested some of my favourite OSS applications with Boomer. Unfortunately it looks like mpg123 doesn’t work under Solaris (problems with the MP3 input plugin). Also it looks like xmms doesn’t compile any more under recent Linux and Solaris versions.

There were some issues. Some of them are trivial and few of them more fundamental. However it looks like these issues can be fixed and Boomer is actually very close to OSS4. It lacks many features that are listed as optional in the OSSv4 API spec. This should not cause any problems if applications use optional OSS features as documented.

There are some fundamental differences in the mixer section that need to be addressed by changing the mixer API documentation. In Boomer /dev/mixer is a symbolic link to /dev/sndstat. This device file supports ioctl calls like SNDCTL_SYSINFO/MIXERINFO/AUDIOINFO. However it doesn’t support the mixer related ioctl calls. For this reason mixer applications need to open the device file reported by SNDCTL_MIXERINFO and use that device when doing the mixer ioctl calls.