Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/12] Audio backend cleanup

[Michael Tokarev]

02.06.2015 13:45, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 2 June 2015 at 10:12, Michael Tokarev <address@hidden> wrote:

>> SDL audio has been the default in Debian for at least two
>> debian releases because of that, we explicitly used
>> --audio-drv-list=sdl,... to list sdl first.  Now we have
>> pa first, but I don't really remember why we changed it.
> 
> I think the important thing here is to avoid ever using
> any of the audio subsystems' back-compatibility layers.
> For instance PA can provide an alsa-compatible interface,
> but if you use it you've just added an extra layer of buffering
> (and a random thread) to your system. So at a distro I would
> expect there to be a "this is the standard audio subsystem"
> distro-wide decision, and the QEMU packages would then follow
> that.

Yes, that's true.  As long as the native version actually works.
As I said before, initially it didn't, and sdl was the only
driver that worked.  Maybe in 0.12, maybe even before, I don't
remember anymore, but the fact remains, in our testing only
sdl was more or less adequate, maybe due to pure luck or
phase of moon. Later native drivers started working, so we
started using native driver which is default to the OS, which
is pulseaudio (installed on all desktop environments) or,
failing that, alsa (native to linux).

Thanks,

/mjt