It strikes me that it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Vendors are still 
releasing applications on Linux that support only OSS, partly due to 
ignorance, but mostly because ALSA's OSS compatibility layer allows them to 
lazily ignore the ALSA API and target all cards, old and new.

Additionally, we can't get rid of OSS compatibility until pretty much all 
hardware has an ALSA driver, and (inferred from your comment) we can't get 
rid of OSS drivers until nothing supports OSS, because the whole of the ALSA 
stuff is a bit larger...

By OSS compatibility, do you mean the OSS PCM emulation layer (/dev/dsp)? I
think that should be kept. That way, legacy apps keep working, especially
unmaintained binary-only things like Unreal Tournament 1.

The OSS emulation does not depend on the OSS tree (CONFIG_SOUND_PRIME), so I
cannot quite follow your second paragraph - we should not remove OSS compat.
anytime.


Jan Engelhardt
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