KMSCON Is Getting Ready To Kick The Kernel Console

[diriel]

It would seem a lot of folks here are pretty clueless about what systemd is really about. It does scratch some "annoying / dangerous" itches. Itches that really do NOT have anything "better" in place. I could be nice and list some of them. You know what? I do not think so. Go READ! Quit being a Troll / Tool and actually read.

Now as for Pulse...I admit I still do not exactly love it, but at least *These Days* it pretty much works. Been a long and twisty road... You would think there might have been a less disruptive way... *cough*

[dfx.]

this is FOSS, and in FOSS you don't have to be an Alpha-tester, unless you want to.
no, it's not fun.
but maybe you can enlighten me if & how i can set up 2 _independent_ stereo + 1 mixed-on-the-fly-from-stereo-to-mono outputs for various programs's _simultaneous_ use, having only built-in motherboard's HDA with "standard" 6 holes (4 for 7.1 setup, Mic In, Line In) and using only pulseaudio and its GUI tools, huh ?

and by "2 _independent_ stereo" i wanted to say "2 _independent_ stereo [outputs] where 1 goes out 1 hole and other is mirrored to 2 at once", everything else applies.
yeah, this is how it is set up now for me with alsa.

i would _looove_ to have a _truly easier_ way for that stuff. which would also guarantee, that there is no unnecessary buffering and sound conversions on the way.

[Hamish Wilson]

Did we really need another Pulseaudio/SystemD thread?

[curaga]

It's quickly becoming the new Nazis, the longer any topic goes on the probability of Lennart being mentioned grows near 1.

[Spidey]

I'm pretty excited for this to get some traction. We will get full featured, hardware accelerated consoles. I imagine that Valve and the linux gaming community at large are cheering for this kind of development. I don't think we'll be seeing console software much more that we see been developed today, but mplayer, maybe SDL, with a KMS console support would be great.

As a gentoo user, I can't say anything about systemd. Although I also use Ubuntu, "it just works" and I don't mind about the under the hood things, like I care when it concerns my gentoo box. On the other hand, I have some experience with pulseaudio. I have two negative points about ALSA:
1- Who the hell invented that configuration file syntax? Did anyone actually thought it would be usable? Is there even an accessible manual for that? I was at a loss when messing with ALSA, I always ended up copying someone else snippets, without knowing what I was doing. Please, point me to some documentation if there is any. I like their online database of hardware configurations, etc, it was a very good idea, but the configuration is just an immense pain in the ass. I'd rather have pulseaudio mess with that.
2- Can ALSA switch output devices on the fly? May I swap the output device of my mp3 from the laptop internal speakers to the recently connect tv, through an hdmi cable? I could do that with Windows, I can do that with PulseAudio. Can I do that with ALSA? Never got it to work.