Comment 93 for bug 579300

@David Henningsson:

My naive interpretation of diagram

http://yokozar.org/blog/content/linuxaudio.png

is

(1) OSS offers the most direct route (2 steps) between a userspace program and the output hardware, and therefore would be expected, a priori, to provide the best latency. Audio-video applications (in contrast to purely audio applications) demand low latency as the primary requirement for the sound system.

(2) The complexity arises from a trend towards virtualization, which introduces software layers not needed by most users, introduces latency and loads the CPU. It is ironic that removal of OSS is seen as a solution.

More generally: you say "porting a few apps to ALSA" might be "worth it". I would have sympathy for this point of view if you were offering to do the porting yourself. It should be remembered that "filing a bug report" against a working application is a euphemism for asking somebody else to do some unnecessary work.

Mike