=== Audio Stack Improvements

Contact: Christos Margiolis <christos@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD audio stack is one of those fields that does not attract the same attention and development as others do, since it has been left largely unmaintained, and, although high in quality, there is still room for improvement -- from lack of audio development frameworks, to missing userland utilities and kernel driver-related bugs.
This project is meant to touch on all those areas, and as such, is more of a general improvement project, than an implementation of a specific feature.

Important work since link:https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-01-2024-03/#_audio_stack_improvements[last report]:

* Asynchronous audio device detach link:https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=44e128fe9d92c1a544b801cb56e907a66ef34691[is now possible].
This functionality already ships with FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE, as well as 14-STABLE.
* Got rid of the "snd_clone" device cloning framework used in man:sound[4] and replaced it with DEVFS_CDEVPRIV(9).
More info about behavior changes in the link:https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=e8c0d15a64fadb4a330f2da7244becaac161bb70[commit description].
Also ships with 14.1-RELEASE and 14-STABLE.
* Several man:sound[4] crash and bug fixes.
* More out of the box support for man:snd_hda[4] laptop sound.
* Series of commits that clean up and simplify parts of man:sound[4].
* Several fixes regarding the OSS API, with the most notable so far being a link:https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=e07f9178502b7cbc0769fc10e99ad0d013f437fd[proper implementation] of the `SNDCTL_AUDIOINFO` and `SNDCTL_ENGINEINFO` IOCTLs.
* Started implementing man:audio[3], an OSS audio and MIDI library.
* Took over maintenance of man:virtual_oss[8].

Future work includes:

* Implementation of an man:audio[8] utility, in similar fashion to man:mixer[8].
* Implementation of a bluetooth device management utility.
* Improve man:mixer[3] and man:mixer[8].
* Improve documentation and test suite where needed.
* Attempt to find a better (ideally automatic) way to handle man:snd_hda[4] pin-patching.
This is an experimental attempt and is not guaranteed to actually yield a working result.

You can also follow the development process in link:https://lists.freebsd.org/subscription/freebsd-multimedia[freebsd-multimedia@], where I post regular reports.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation