Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"

Comments

Pulse Audio

[Beelzebud]

I don't take anything from this guy seriously after dealing with Pulse Audio on a few systems. The shit never improved and only added a layer of incompatibility to systems that ran just fine using ALSA by itself.

Re:Pulse Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

He has a tendency to develop things halfway, without taking any input from any users, and then everyone using Fedora has to end up using it even if it's complete shit. If you criticize him, he's got some staunch defenders that will call you out on it, mostly the people who have only ever used Linux on a laptop... that really does seem to be the only thing he cares about.

PulseAudio - a useless NIH layer. ALSA was just fine. He lists a bunch of other problems with Linux audio, but everyone was just using ALSA directly, nobody was using his straw men really (Jack? OSS? Really?) This is the first thing I remove on my Linux boxes.

I predict systemd will be his next "hit". He named the control command "systemctl" even though every Linux has a "sysctl" command already... one of the most easily avoidable CLI namespace problems I have ever seen in over 20 years of UNIX and 18 years of Linux administration. I think systemd is because he really really wants to make Linux into MacOS X. If you want MacOS X, then great, it's a fine desktop OS, have at it.... but Linux is still mostly used on servers, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. Anyway, systemd just throws out everything that was good about init and even upstart, and starts over, and he is busy adding the features of cron and inetd to it for some reason. Because saving some tiny amount of space in the process table is somehow useful.

I just wish there was some review of features that make it into Fedora, etc, to see if they're really worth it.

Re:Holding back?

[Wonko the Sane]

Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.

Re:Holding back?

[TheRaven64]

Working audio was what made me switch to FreeBSD in the first place. This was back around 2001. The state of the art was something like this:

Applications played sound by writing writing to /dev/dsp. This was a fairly standard way of playing sound, based on the Solaris, and supported by most *NIX systems. OSS defined a set of ioctls for controlling playback, and these worked everywhere. There was one slight problem: most implementations didn't support software sound mixing if your hardware (like most cheap AC97 CODECs) couldn't do mixing in hardware. This meant that only one device could write to /dev/dsp at once, meaning only one application could play sound. KDE and GNOME both had their own (incompatible) sound daemons, so multiple KDE or multiple GNOME apps could play sound at once, but not both. I was using a KDE Jabber client, a GNOME email client and wanted to get audio new message notifications from either. I also wanted XMMS (which wrote directly to /dev/dsp) to play music in the background, and I wanted to play BZFlag! sometimes and have its sound work without breaking anything else.

In Linux land, there was ALSA. ALSA did sound mixing, but it required your applications to be rewritten to use it. Some sound cards only had ALSA drives, some only had OSS drivers. A few had both. ALSA had a half-arsed OSS emulation mode, but that broke various other things, and still didn't let multiple OSS applications play audio at once.

FreeBSD 4 had a virtual channel (vchan) mechanism. You had several /dev/dsp.n devices. /dev/dsp was a symbolic link to one of them. I set the KDE sound daemon to use /dev/dsp.1, the GNOME one to /dev/dsp.2, XMMS to use /dev/dsp.3, and whatever other app tried to use /dev/dsp got the /dev/dsp.0 channel (typically games, running in the foreground). All of my running apps could play sound at once and, after a small amount of initial configuration, it Just Worked.

I didn't stay with FreeBSD 4 for long on the desktop, I started using the FreeBSD 5 betas. This was a really unpopular FreeBSD release, because it was only about as stable as Linux at the time, which most FreeBSD users felt was completely unacceptable. It improved the sound system so that the vchans were automatically allocated. Now, things worked just as well as they did with FreeBSD 4, but I didn't need to configure anything. Apps could just open /dev/dsp and they'd each get a new vchan, up to a configurable limit (I set it to 16, which seemed to be more than I needed).

Now I use FreeBSD 8. As well as the earlier features, it has a new low-latency sound mixing path, per-vchan volume controls, and full OSS 4 support. Oh, and it even has a compatibility layer, so if I run old code that uses the OSS 3 APIs and tries to modify the global volume control via /dev/mixer, I can make it only modify its own vchan's volume.

Meanwhile, Linux developers were told that, actually, they shouldn't use ALSA, they should rewrite their sound code yet again, this time for PulseAudio. And people wonder why I hate having to support Linux...