Hello,
Miller,
If you are using a current ALSA release things are pretty well broken. I gave up trying to track the changes until things settle down with the ALSA development (which will probably be anonther month at least). I had another imporoved version that did mmap mode and some other things but almost as soon as I got it working things became 'interesting' with the ALSA releases. To their credit, though, the ALSA developers are making some good changes it seems. The last ALSA I know it works with is 0.5.6 - if this doesn't work let me know.
Thats true, since I tried to use them there is each month a major change which breaks the upwards compatibility. I think this will go on until kernel 2.5.x when they want ALSA in the kernel, then they have to stop (hopfully a ALSA 1.x), its also true inside the driver development. I hope that at that time ALSA has reached the desired quality for realtime performance since most changes nowadays are to improve Multiprocessor and Realtime performance. Low level drivers do not make any conversion anymore, so are straight forward, and everything until resampling with different rates goes into the library.
So maybe for good realtime performance we should use lowlevel because we dont know what ALSA-lib will do with the the samples.
The question is should I make the native RME-drivers also for kernel 2.4.x (since its broken for that versions) or should we use ALSA else ???
There is a need for the 2.4.0 kernel for Athlon-Boards with VIA Chipsets to get best performance also with 4xAGP.
mfg winfried