Re: [RFC] no native audio translator on Debian GNU/Hurd 0.9; design discussion for /hurd/audio

I was doing a proof of concept taking one alsa driver for intel pci card and making a jack backend for it so there should be no other userland requirements apart from using the jack api for sound. It needs work.

The experiment lives at https://code.zammit.org/damo22/jack1-hurd

Thanks,
Damien

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-------- Original Message --------
On 31/5/26 10:03 am, Borja Tarraso <[email protected]> wrote:

>  Hi NexusSfan,
>  
>  Thanks for the pointer.
>  
>  > This is already a thing. https://github.com/dm0-/hurd-rump-audio
>  
>  I went and read the repo.  It is a useful proof of concept (the
>  "settrans /dev/audio + rump-AC97 + PulseAudio module" path I was
>  asking about under level-b is exactly the shape that lives there),
>  but the author's own README caveat is that it is "just a silly toy
>  program" and that the right next step is writing a proper
>  PulseAudio module instead of going through the rump translator.
>  The repo also has just the one commit and is not packaged for
>  hurd-amd64 in Debian apt, so as far as the canonical-image gap is
>  concerned the RFC's question still stands: what is the upstream
>  direction for a real /hurd/audio plus a backend that QEMU
>  intel-hda / ac97 can drive without each user reproducing dm0-'s
>  local rump build by hand?
>  
>  > I would much prefer sndio over ALSA or other audio interfaces,
>  > but some developers are working on ALSA for Hurd, I've heard.
>  
>  sndio matches the level-b sketch in the RFC; its IPC shape is the
>  small / readable one and it is the lowest-common-denominator API
>  that survives the Mach IPC boundary cleanly.  Good to know it is
>  the preference among Hurd hackers as well, that is one less design
>  question.
>  
>  Do you know who is doing the ALSA-on-Hurd work, or where it is
>  tracked?  Happy to coordinate with whoever it is so the two efforts
>  do not collide; if ALSA lands first I can pivot the userland side
>  accordingly.
>  
>  I am also filing in parallel on [email protected] for
>  the packaging side (bundle pulseaudio in the canonical image so
>  the apt-installed userland path comes up zero-config); the deeper
>  translator work stays in scope for this thread.
>  
>  Thanks,
>  Borja Tarraso
>  [email protected]
>  
>