Re: [GSoC] GNU/Hurd Sound Support

[Richard Braun]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 10:59:09AM +0200, Mohammed Gamal wrote:
> I have good experience with C/C++ and I am familiar with POSIX API, my
> coding experience was generally in userspace, I didn't do anything
> serious in kernel space. As for your suggestion, I think it's a very
> good idea.

Sound support in the Hurd and Mach requires a lot more knowledge than
that. If you want to support old ISA boards, you need to take care of
the dirty details about the DMA. If you want to support more recent
PCI boards, you need to improve the Mach PCI "subsystem" a lot. You
also have to learn the Mach VM and IPC interfaces in depth to use them
correctly, and maybe extend them since they may not fit well for what
you intend to do (user space drivers). For example, you have no
control of the caching policy (you would probably need write-through
when mapping PCI boards memory in your user space driver process space).

> Sorry, there was some misunderstanding of the term "translator" on my
> part here. What I mean is that we'd need a program, rather than a
> translator,  for each sound card that'd talk "libsound" that'd in turn
> pass messages to the Mach kernel. However, does what you say here mean
> that we'd rather have to write the drivers directly in the Mach
> kernel?

It is currently the most reasonable approach. Most drivers are written
for kernels, and unless you intend to rewrite them all, we need to grab
existing drivers and plug them into Mach. In addition, Mach has some
roots from BSD, and BSD has kept some interfaces from Mach (e.g. the
NetBSD UVM system interface is very close to the Mach VM interface).
This should reduce the amount of work needed to port BSD drivers.
A kernel/userspace event facility was started at some point in time,
but it remained experimental and was never actually used to implement
any quality driver in userspace. Developing this is completely outside
the scope of the GCoS project.

> >  In fact, Richard Braun (syn on IRC) has once tried porting the driver,
> >  and had it mostly working, but there was a serious bug he couldn't track
> >  down, so he gave up. You could try to contact him -- perhaps you could
> >  use his code as a starting point, or at least get some advice.

With more experience, I'd suggest you don't use my code. The "bug" I had
was mainly due to my misuse of the Mach VM and IPC interfaces, and I
currently don't have enough time for hacking on this again :'(. You can
find it at http://cvs.sceen.net/index.cgi/gnumach/ though.

-- 
Richard Braun

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