[alsa-devel] future of sounds/oss
Takashi Iwai
tiwai at suse.de
Thu May 11 10:46:47 CEST 2017
On Thu, 11 May 2017 10:21:33 +0200,
Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
> Ho Jaroslav, hi Takashi,
>
> do you know who still uses the sound/oss drivers and why? I've
> recently been looking into getting rid of set_fs for using
> copy_{from,to}_user and friends on kernel pointers, and the sound
> code is a big abuser, both ALSA and the legacy OSS code.
Yeah, I also started looking at it after reading the LWN article.
The removal of set_fs() in ALSA part was already finished, and I'm
currently brushing up the patches. It'll be in 4.13 at latest.
But the set_fs() usage in OSS code is hard to get rid of, due to the
in-kernel ioctl calls, and I really don't want to touch such dusty
codes, either. So I wanted to post the very same question, but you
were faster :)
> But looking at the OSS code it's pretty grotty, and also appears
> to be pretty much unmaintained except for global cleanups. Is there
> any chance we could look into getting rid of it over the next few
> merge windows or are there people that rely on it?
I don't think there are any active users. The only slight concern is
that there are a few ancient devices that are supported only by some
OSS drivers. But these are over decades, and very unlikely alive.
That said, I'd love to drop that legacy stuff; or maybe as a
soft-landing, begin with disabling the build of sound/oss in Kconfig.
The latter can be done even for 4.12, if Linus doesn't mind.
thanks,
Takashi
More information about the Alsa-devel
mailing list