Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed,  3 Mar 2004 19:46:34 +0100 (CET)
From:      "Jorn Argelo" <jorn@wcborstel.nl>
To:        fcash-ml@sd73.bc.ca
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Standard sbc and pcm support in GENERIC kernel?
Message-ID:  <20040303184634.8ADD9170D4@www.wcborstel.nl>
In-Reply-To: <49180.192.168.0.185.1078334195.squirrel@mailtest.sd73.bc.ca>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On 3/3/2004, "Freddie Cash" <fcash-ml@sd73.bc.ca> wrote:

>> I've been on the question list for some time, and I have noticed that
>> many people do not know how to get sound support up and
>> running in FreeBSD 5.X. I know that re-compiling the kernel is easy
>> enough, but there are still people not willing to do so, as I have
>> noticed on the list. Therefor I thought it might be an idea to put
>> sound support in the GENERIC kernel configuration, so that
>> newbies will no longer find themselves stuck with that.
>
>Something that has always stumped me about FreeBSD, especially about
>people moving from Linux to FreeBSD, is the belief that one *must*
>recompile the kernel for sound support.  Why?? =20

Personally I always recompile the kernel when I install FreeBSD on a
system. So I always put in sbc and psm when required. I never really
knew what kernel modules I should use actually.

 Why not use them??
>
>Getting sound to work is as easy as:
>=09- kldload snd_driver
>=09- cat /dev/sndstat
>=09- kldunload snd_driver
>=09- kldload snd_pcm
>=09- and sometimes, kldload snd_<driver from sndstat>
>=09- edit /boot/loader.conf to autoload the correct driver
>

Might be handy to add these things to the handbook.

>
>> I hope to hear other people's opinion about this.
>
>I'd prefer to see sound left out of the GENERIC kernel.  Not all
>soundcards are supported by pcm, or by sbc, or by csa, or by gus, and
>putting all of those into the kernel will add quite a bit of bloat.
>GENERIC should support the most common hardware, not everything under
>the sun.

I believe a soundcard is quite common hardware these days (on desktop
machines, that is). And maybe not all soundcards are supported by pcm,
sbc, csa or gus, but I think many of them are. For instance, my on-board
sound chip in my ASUS board is perfectly fine detected by FreeBSD, but
for Windows (both 98 and XP) I need to install drivers for it.

As for important servers, I wouldn't let an important server run on the
GENERIC kernel. I would build one myself, and pull out some unwanted
things to grab some performance. So one can easily get rid of sound
support as well.

Thanks for sharing your opinion though.

Cheers,

Jorn



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040303184634.8ADD9170D4>