Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 2:05 AM vermaden <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> For a start lets define some TERMS. I use UPPERCASE not to shout - but to
> underline a part of the sentence that is needed to be underlined - this is
> plain email - I do not have Bold/Underscore/Italic options - keep that in
> mind - now - to the core of the issue ...
>
> I always considered FreeBSD OSS audio/sound subsystem superior to all
> ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire and other dramas from the Linux world ... but not
> anymore.
>
> Somewhere between 14.3-RELEASE and 14.4-RELEASE things begin to get broken
> - I thought that upgrade to latest and greatest 15.1-RELEASE would solve my
> issues - as there were LOTS of sound/audio related things.
>

A regression test ("git bisect") would be very helpful in isolating this
regression. I would do one, but my sound is perfect, it needs to be done by
someone with sound problems.

Also only 15 commits to sys/dev/sound exist between the merge base of 14.3
and 14.4:

$ git merge-base release/14.3.0 release/14.4.0
ad1f2e80c8324716e80aa9d2955f42e68cc66308
$ git log ad1f2e80c8324716e80aa9d2955f42e68cc66308..release/14.4.0
sys/dev/sound | grep ^commit | wc -l
      15

so the bug is probably in one of those.