The case for the /usr merge [LWN.net]

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 10:11 UTC (Sun) by niner (guest, #26151)
In reply to: The case for the /usr merge by sbergman27
Parent article: The case for the /usr merge

> Firefox should probably provide a volume control for its HTML5 video, if it doesn't already. Certainly Totem, VLC, and Mplayer plugins do. As well as the all-important Flashplayer.

The only thing that MPlayer does is control the PCM volume. So when you turn down the volume in MPlayer, everything else gets quiet as well. That's hardly what I would call per application volume control.

> What color is the sky on your planet? I haven't seen a motherboard in years that didn't provide hardware mixing. Uninstall pulse, and I'll bet your current Mobo will mix just fine. Don't just buy the the PA propaganda uncritically. Try it for yourself.

Your motherboard does nothing! It's ALSAs dmix plugin that does the mixing in this case.

> And yet I uninstall PulseAudio, and without exception, sound works perfectly fine. A very strange series of audio driver bugs, indeed. They only ever affect Pulse Audio.

Because PulseAudio tries to do something better than sound systems on Linux have before. It uses timer based scheduling instead of interrupt based which lieterally increases battery life on my laptop for hours due to fewer CPU wakeups. Just like for example OS X has been able to for years.

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The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 11:12 UTC (Sun) by mikachu (guest, #5333) [Link] (4 responses)

echo softvol = yes >> ~/.mplayer/config

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 11:32 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

Which raises the inevitable question "Who, exactly, thought that softvol=no being the default was a good idea?".

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 13:43 UTC (Sun) by mastro (guest, #72665) [Link]

Softvol uses a bit more CPU and when used at very low volume degrades sound quality when compared with just setting the correct PCM volume. At least this was the case a few years ago, not sure how stuff works with pulseaudio.

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 13:58 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

Why bother with editing config files, when I can just use pavucontrol which gets the job done and works the same everywhere?

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 30, 2012 20:18 UTC (Mon) by mikachu (guest, #5333) [Link]

I was just correcting an incorrect statement, feel free to use whatever you want.

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 29, 2012 17:06 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (3 responses)

"Your motherboard does nothing! It's ALSAs dmix plugin that does the mixing in this case."

Even better. Then Pulse is not only redundant, but in some cases double-redundant.

"It uses timer based scheduling instead of interrupt based which lieterally increases battery life on my laptop for hours due to fewer CPU wakeups."

Show me the data. I'm extremely skeptical. Unless you mean that you save a lot of power after your sound dies. That would make sense.

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 30, 2012 1:40 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (2 responses)

dmix won't be enabled if Pulse is active, in sane distributions, obviously.

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Jan 30, 2012 19:40 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (1 responses)

But ALSA will be there. (Is anyone using OSS?) So PA's "functionality" is still redundant in this capacity.

The case for the /usr merge

Posted Feb 2, 2012 8:54 UTC (Thu) by keeperofdakeys (guest, #82635) [Link]

ALSA is incapable of software mixing, the dmix plugin handles this. So PA isn't redundant in this capacity.

As for OSS, no one uses it directly (or at least shouldn't). Many programs will use the OSS emulation offered by ALSA (which doesn't support software mixing). The interesting thing about OSS is that it was originally open source, became closed, and became open source again with version 4. Although, now we have shifted to ALSA, it will probably never be as popular.