[alsa-devel] Exclusive access to capture device

[Guy Rutenberg]

Hi Sean,

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Sean McNamara <smcnam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hopefully you aren't writing a desktop application, because distros
> and users generally abhor the notion of an application "hogging" the
> sound device for any reason, and would prefer that all access be
> non-exclusive. But if you're coding for an embedded device, then I can
> understand this approach.
>
> I'm actually writing a desktop application. The idea is to extract random
bits from microphone in order to create a true random number generator
(after being extracted the bits go through an unbiasing phase and
compression by a hash function to increase entropy). So I intentionally
want to hog the sound device, as to be sure that nobody else is recording
at the same time I'm gathering entropy.

So basically I want to temporarily disable any hardware/software mixing on
the mixing device. Is it possible given user privileges? Assuming
root privileges?

Thanks,

Guy