Hello,
I've just been entertaining myself with trying to get Pd to run with Alsa 0.9Beta 4. I had to upgrade to RedHat 7.1 because 0.9Beta4 seems not to work with 2.2 kernels. And now I find that Pd 0.33test6 (the latest) doesn't work at all with Alsa except in OSS emulation. OSS emulation seems to work OK at least.
If any of you have tried test versions of Pd 0.33 with Alsa 0.9B4 and founf out how to get it to work I'd sure like to know how you do it. In the meantime I'll continue trying to find out what my problems are.
If got PD to work with ALSA 0.9Beta4 and 2.4.5 (but not 2.4.4 some socket open troubles) and the snd-card-rme96 (RME96/8 PST) Soundcard and MIDI with PCI128 (snd-card-ens1370) and snd-seq-oss. But I failed with rme9652, since all the anounced features (which are actually drawbacks in performance) like dev "plug:x,x", "share:x,x" or "multi:x,x" I cant get to work, even hacking on pd code (doing my own testing programm).
I got it to work with the onboard CMIPCI-Card, but using MIDI of this Card frezzes the computer, so I think some of the drivers have MIDI broken and I worked a little better (only MIDI-out) if I turn the APIC (and IO-APIC)-feature in kernel Config on (not SMP).
Also the philosophy in ALSA is that using "mmap -interface" feature turns out that you have to use a mmap-pointer update routine which in facts makes a copy of sounddata to the real mmap-memory, which in fact undermines the idea of mmap and doing the data-conversion (flot to int32) ourselves. So there I see no point to use mmap in ALSA, since it does the same: coping sound-data to the device ;-(. So I think best is using Guenthers driver for Hammerfall (which also provides an stereo device for eg. snd Soundeditor and so on).
mfg winfried