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

[Peter Maydell]

On 2 June 2015 at 10:12, Michael Tokarev <address@hidden> wrote:
> I also tried alsa, oss and pa, with these audio was more
> distorted than with sdl.  Sdl version sounds cleanly, while
> alsa and pa, at least in the past, and at least if memory
> serves me right, sounded like a if a good portion of noize
> has been mixed in with sound, or like when sound is with
> quick monmentary drops which happens at high frequency
> (maybe 200Hz).
>
> 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.

thanks
-- PMM