Hi all!
What do the smixer modules do? I mean these files:
/usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-ac97.so /usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-hda.so /usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-sbase.so
Should they always be shipped along with the main libasound library? I maintain the alsa-lib package in OpenEmbedded, and currently OpenEmbedded has separate packages for libasound and the smixer modules, and I wonder if that's a good idea. It looks like the smixer modules don't get installed by default when libasound is installed. Debian, in contrast, ships the smixer modules in the libasound package.
After studying the source code a bit, it seems that the smixer modules are dynamically loaded by the "simple mixer" interface of libasound. I'm not familiar with the purpose of that interface. I don't know if there are many applications that use that interface, and I don't know if those applications that do use it suffer badly if the smixer modules aren't installed.