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OpenSolaris Project: Open Sound System

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Introduction

This page has been updated to reflect the new Boomer project being developed by Sun Microsystems and 4Front. The old project page, which referred to 4Front's unbundled sound system, is still available.

Boomer (PSARC 2008/318) is the next generation audio subsystem for Solaris. It provides greater support for advanced audio hardware (5.1, 7.1, high definition audio) as well as greater programming interface support for the latest audio applications.

Specifically, Boomer supports all current Sun audio hardware, and supports the legacy Sun audio(7I) API, as well as the Open Sound System API.

Contents

• Features
• Beta Release
• Source Code

Boomer Has Integrated

Boomer is part of the build 115 release of the ON consolidation.

Features

• Supported audio formats
• Supports 8/16/24/32 bits/sample audio formats
• Supports big or little endian linear PCM, ULAW, and ALAW
• Supports sampling rates from 8KHz up to 192KHz
• Supports mono, stereo, quad, 5.1, 7.1 and multichannel audio devices
• Transparent Software based Audio Mixer
• Allows applications to share the same "real" audio device regardless of what format is requested by the application.
• Supports recording and full duplex in addition to playback.
• Ability to mix stereo and multichannel audio streams up to 7.1/192Khz/32bit.
• Supports full 24 bit range without loss of precision during internal computations.
• Each application has its own independent volume controls.
• Simple DDI
• Very similar to other Open Source OS DDIs, makes porting new drivers easy.
• Completely insulates driver from nearly all details of STREAMs, etc.
• Average Boomer driver is less than half as many lines of code compared to legacy Sun drivers.
• DDI to be published in man pages, WDD, as part of Phase II.
• Full Solaris native framework
• Legacy audio applications supported.
• Legacy audio hardware (e.g. audiocs) fully supported.
• Efficient implementation without unnecessary conversion layers.
• Simpler integrated architecture compared to 3rd party solutions.
• Full support for Solaris features such as Suspend/Resume, Fast Reboot, etc.
• Full support for advanced device features (MSI-X interrupts, advanced cache synchronization, etc.
• Devices are native STREAMs devices, and behave accordingly (e.g. for dynamic reconfiguration, etc.)
• To be Integrated into ON, completely replaces legacy audio.
• Fully Open Source
• Code includes CDDL sources licensed from 4Front Technologies, Inc.
• Large investments in improvements to original code included by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
• Previously closed source drivers reimplemented using CDDL sources.

Application Support

Any application can be recompiled with the OSS API if it has native support for OSS. The header file, /usr/include/sys/soundcard.h, has all the defines that applications should need.

Legacy Sun applications should work fine as well.

Announcements

27 Apr 2009

Boomer Phase I In Build 115!