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home | helpSOUND(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual SOUND(4) NAME sound, pcm, snd -- FreeBSD PCM audio device infrastructure SYNOPSIS To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file: device sound Non-PnP sound cards require the following lines in device.hints(5): hint.pcm.0.at="isa" hint.pcm.0.irq="5" hint.pcm.0.drq="1" hint.pcm.0.flags="0x0" DESCRIPTION Note: There exists some ambiguity in the naming at the moment (sound, pcm, snd). It will be resolved soon by renaming device sound to device snd, and doing associated changes. The sound driver provides support for PCM audio play and capture. This driver also supports various PCI, ISA, WSS/MSS compatible sound cards, AC97 mixer and High Definition Audio. Once the sound driver attaches, supported devices provide audio record and playback channels. The FreeBSD sound system provides dynamic mixing ``VCHAN'' and rate conver- sion ``soft formats''. True full duplex operation is available on most sound cards. If the sound card is supported by a bridge driver, the sound driver works in conjunction with the bridge driver. Apart from the usual parameters, the flags field is used to specify the secondary DMA channel (generally used for capture in full duplex cards). Flags are set to 0 for cards not using a secondary DMA channel, or to 0x10 + C to specify channel C. The driver does its best to recognize the installed hardware and drive it correctly so the user is not required to add several lines in /boot/device.hints. For PCI and ISA PnP cards this is actually easy since they identify themselves. For legacy ISA cards, the driver looks for MSS cards at addresses 0x530 and 0x604 (unless overridden in /boot/device.hints). Boot Variables In general, the module snd_foo corresponds to device snd_foo and can be loaded by the boot loader(8) via loader.conf(5) or from the command line using the kldload(8) utility. Options which can be specified in /boot/loader.conf include: snd_driver_load (``NO'') If set to ``YES'', this option loads all available drivers. snd_emu10k1_load (``NO'') If set to ``YES'', only the SoundBlaster 5.1 driver and dependent modules will be loaded. snd_foo_load (``NO'') If set to ``YES'', load driver for card/chipset foo. To define default values for the different mixer channels, set the chan- nel to the preferred value using hints, e.g.: hint.pcm.0.line="0". This will mute the input channel per default. VCHANs Each device can optionally support more playback and recording channels than physical hardware provides by using ``virtual channels'' or VCHANs. VCHAN options can be configured via the sysctl(8) interface but can only be manipulated while the device is inactive. Runtime Configuration There are a number of sysctl(8) variables available. hw.snd.* tunables are global settings and dev.pcm.* are device specific. hw.snd.latency_profile Define sets of buffering latency con- version tables for the hw.snd.latency tunable. A value of 0 will use a low and aggressive latency profile which can result in possible underruns if the application cannot keep up with a rapid irq rate, especially during high work- load. The default value is 1, which is considered a moderate/safe latency pro- file. hw.snd.latency Configure the buffering latency. Only affects applications that do not explicitly request blocksize / frag- ments. This tunable provides finer granularity than the hw.snd.latency_profile tunable. Possi- ble values range between 0 (lowest latency) and 10 (highest latency). hw.snd.report_soft_formats Controls the internal format conversion if it is available transparently to the application software. When disabled or not available, the application will only be able to select formats the device natively supports. hw.snd.compat_linux_mmap Enable to allow PROT_EXEC page map- pings. All Linux applications using sound and mmap(2) require this. hw.snd.feeder_rate_round Sample rate rounding threshold, to avoid large prime division at the cost of accuracy. All requested sample rates will be rounded to the nearest threshold value. Possible values range between 0 (disabled) and 500. Default is 25. hw.snd.feeder_rate_max Maximum allowable sample rate. hw.snd.feeder_rate_min Minimum allowable sample rate. hw.snd.verbose Level of verbosity for the /dev/sndstat device. Higher values include more output and the highest level, four, should be used when reporting problems. Other options include: 0 Installed devices and their allo- cated bus resources. 1 The number of playback, record, virtual channels, and flags per device. 2 Channel information per device including the channel's current format, speed, and pseudo device statistics such as buffer overruns and buffer underruns. 3 File names and versions of the cur- rently loaded sound modules. 4 Various messages intended for debugging. hw.snd.maxautovchans Global VCHAN setting that only affects devices with at least one playback or recording channel available. The sound system will dynamically create up this many VCHANs. Set to ``0'' if no VCHANS are desired. Maximum value is 256. hw.snd.default_unit Default sound card for systems with multiple sound cards. When using devfs(5), the default device for /dev/dsp. Equivalent to a symlink from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp${hw.snd.default_unit}. hw.snd.default_auto Enable to automatically assign default sound unit to the most recent attached device. dev.pcm.%d.[play|rec].vchans The current number of VCHANs allocated per device. This can be set to preal- locate a certain number of VCHANs. Setting this value to ``0'' will dis- able VCHANs for this device. dev.pcm.%d.[play|rec].vchanrate Sample rate speed for VCHAN mixing. All playback paths will be converted to this sample rate before the mixing process begins. dev.pcm.%d.[play|rec].vchanformat Format for VCHAN mixing. All playback paths will be converted to this format before the mixing process begins. dev.pcm.%d.polling Experimental polling mode support where the driver operates by querying the device state on each tick using a callout(9) mechanism. Disabled by default and currently only available for a few device drivers. Recording Channels On devices that have more than one recording source (ie: mic and line), there is a corresponding /dev/dsp%d.r%d device. Statistics Channel statistics are only kept while the device is open. So with situ- ations involving overruns and underruns, consider the output while the errant application is open and running. IOCTL Support The driver supports most of the OSS ioctl() functions, and most applica- tions work unmodified. A few differences exist, while memory mapped playback is supported natively and in Linux emulation, memory mapped recording is not due to VM system design. As a consequence, some appli- cations may need to be recompiled with a slightly modified audio module. See <sys/soundcard.h> for a complete list of the supported ioctl() func- tions. FILES The sound drivers may create the following device nodes: /dev/audio%d.%d Sparc-compatible audio device. /dev/dsp%d.%d Digitized voice device. /dev/dspW%d.%d Like /dev/dsp, but 16 bits per sample. /dev/dsp%d.p%d Playback channel. /dev/dsp%d.r%d Record channel. /dev/dsp%d.vp%d Virtual playback channel. /dev/dsp%d.vr%d Virtual recording channel. /dev/sndstat Current sound status, including all channels and driv- ers. The first number in the device node represents the unit number of the sound device. All sound devices are listed in /dev/sndstat. Additional messages are sometimes recorded when the device is probed and attached, these messages can be viewed with the dmesg(8) utility. The above device nodes are only created on demand through the dynamic devfs(5) clone handler. Users are strongly discouraged to access them directly. For specific sound card access, please instead use /dev/dsp or /dev/dsp%d. DIAGNOSTICS pcm%d:play:%d:dsp%d.p%d: play interrupt timeout, channel dead The hard- ware does not generate interrupts to serve incoming (play) or outgoing (record) data. unsupported subdevice XX A device node is not created properly. SEE ALSO snd_ad1816(4), snd_als4000(4), snd_atiixp(4), snd_audiocs(4), snd_cmi(4), snd_cs4281(4), snd_csa(4), snd_ds1(4), snd_emu10k1(4), snd_emu10kx(4), snd_envy24(4), snd_envy24ht(4), snd_es137x(4), snd_ess(4), snd_fm801(4), snd_gusc(4), snd_hda(4), snd_ich(4), snd_maestro(4), snd_maestro3(4), snd_mss(4), snd_neomagic(4), snd_sbc(4), snd_solo(4), snd_spicds(4), snd_t4dwave(4), snd_uaudio(4), snd_via8233(4), snd_via82c686(4), snd_vibes(4), devfs(5), device.hints(5), loader.conf(5), dmesg(8), kldload(8), sysctl(8) The OSS API, http://www.opensound.com/pguide/oss.pdf. HISTORY The sound device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 2.2.6 as pcm, written by Luigi Rizzo. It was later rewritten in FreeBSD 4.0 by Cameron Grant. The API evolved from the VOXWARE standard which later became OSS stan- dard. AUTHORS Luigi Rizzo <luigi@iet.unipi.it> initially wrote the pcm device driver and this manual page. Cameron Grant <gandalf@vilnya.demon.co.uk> later revised the device driver for FreeBSD 4.0. Seigo Tanimura <tanimura@r.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp> revised this manual page. It was then rewritten for FreeBSD 5.2. BUGS Some features of your sound card (e.g., global volume control) might not be supported on all devices. FreeBSD 7.2 June 23, 2007 FreeBSD 7.2
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | DIAGNOSTICS | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS | BUGS
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