Welcome to Once-a-year Sound Mega-Commit. Enjoy numerous updates and fixes

in every sense.

General
-------

- Multichannel safe, endian safe, format safe
   * Large part of critical pcm filters such as vchan.c, feeder_rate.c,
     feeder_volume.c, feeder_fmt.c and feeder.c has been rewritten so that
     using them does not cause the pcm data to be converted to 16bit little
     endian.
   * Macrosses for accessing pcm data safely are defined within sound.h in
     the form of PCM_READ_* / PCM_WRITE_*
   * Currently, most of them are probably limited for mono/stereo handling,
     but the future addition of true multichannel will be much easier.

- Low latency operation
  * Well, this require lot more works to do not just within sound driver,
    but we're heading towards right direction. Buffer/block sizing within
    channel.c is rewritten to calculate precise allocation for various
    combination of sample/data/rate size. As a result, applying correct
    SNDCTL_DSP_POLICY value will achive expected latency behaviour simmilar
    to what commercial 4front driver do.
  * Signal handling fix. ctrl+c of "cat /dev/zero > /dev/dsp" does not
    result long delay.
  * Eliminate sound truncation if the sound data is too small.
    DIY:
      1) Download / extract
         http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/lowlatency/shortfiles.tar.gz
      2) Do a comparison between "cat state*.au > /dev/dsp" and
         "for x in state*.au ; do cat $x > /dev/dsp ; done"
         - there should be no "perceivable" differences.
    Double close for PR kern/31445.

  CAVEAT: Low latency come with (unbearable) price especially for poorly
          written applications. Applications that trying to act smarter
	  by requesting (wrong) blocksize/blockcount will suffer the most.
	  Fixup samples/patches can be found at:
	  http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/ports/

- Switch minimum/maximum sampling rate limit to "1" and "2016000" (48k * 42)
  due to closer compatibility with 4front driver.
  Discussed with: marcus@ (long time ago?)

- All driver specific sysctls in the form of "hw.snd.pcm%d.*" have been
  moved to their own dev sysctl nodes, notably:
  hw.snd.pcm%d.vchans -> dev.pcm.%d.vchans
  Bump __FreeBSD_version.

Driver specific
---------------

- Ditto for sysctls.

- snd_atiixp, snd_es137x, snd_via8233, snd_hda
  * Numerous cleanups and fixes.
  * _EXPERIMENTAL_ polling mode support using simple callout_* mechanisme.
   This was intended for pure debugging and latency measurement, but proven
   good enough in few unexpected and rare cases (such as problematic shared
   IRQ with GIANT devices - USB). Polling can be enabled/disabled through
   dev.pcm.0.polling. Disabled by default.

- snd_ich
  * Fix possible overflow during speed calibration. Delay final
    initialization (pcm_setstatus) after calibration finished.
    PR: kern/100169
    Tested by: Kevin Overman <oberman@es.net>
  * Inverted EAPD for few Nec VersaPro.
    PR: kern/104715
    Submitted by: KAWATA Masahiko <kawata@mta.biglobe.ne.jp>

Thanks to various people, notably Joel Dahl, Yuriy Tsibizov, Kevin Oberman,
those at #freebsd-azalia @ freenode and others for testing.

Joel Dahl will do the manpage update.

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/UPDATING b/UPDATING
index 0cfd35f..6eb0286 100644
--- a/UPDATING
+++ b/UPDATING
@@ -21,6 +21,19 @@ NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 7.x IS SLOW:
 	developers choose to disable these features on build machines
 	to maximize performance.
 
+20061126:
+	Sound infrastructure has been updated with various fixes and
+	improvements. Most of the changes are pretty much transparent,
+	with exceptions of followings:
+	1) All sound driver specific sysctls (hw.snd.pcm%d.*) have been
+	   moved to their own dev sysctl nodes, for example:
+		hw.snd.pcm0.vchans -> dev.pcm.0.vchans
+	2) /dev/dspr%d.%d has been deprecated. Each channel now has its
+	   own chardev in the form of "dsp%d.<function>%d", where <function>
+	   is p = playback, r = record and v = virtual, respectively. Users
+	   are encouraged to use these devs instead of (old) "/dev/dsp%d.%d".
+	   This does not affect those who are using "/dev/dsp".
+
 20061122:
 	The following binaries have been disconnected from the build:
 	mount_devfs, mount_ext2fs, mount_fdescfs, mount_procfs, mount_linprocfs,