xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/pcm.4 (revision 729362425c09cf6b362366aabc6fb547eee8035a)
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26.\" $FreeBSD$
27.\"
28.Dd June 3, 1998
29.Dt PCM 4
30.Os
31.Sh NAME
32.Nm pcm ,
33.Nm snd
34.Nd FreeBSD PCM audio device driver
35.Sh SYNOPSIS
36For a card with bridge driver support, and a PnP card:
37.Cd "device pcm"
38.Pp
39For a card without bridge driver support, and a non-PnP card,
40the following lines may be required in
41.Pa /boot/device.hints :
42.Cd hint.pcm.0.at="isa"
43.Cd hint.pcm.0.irq="5"
44.Cd hint.pcm.0.drq="1"
45.Cd hint.pcm.0.flags="0x0"
46.Sh DESCRIPTION
47The
48.Nm
49driver provides support for PCM audio play and capture.
50This driver
51also supports various PCI and WSS/MSS compatible ISA sound cards, and
52AC97 mixer.
53True full duplex operation is available on most cards.
54.Pp
55If your sound card is supported by a bridge driver,
56.Nm
57driver works
58in conjunction with the bridge driver.
59.Pp
60Apart from the usual parameters, the flags field is used to specify
61the secondary DMA channel (generally used for capture in full duplex
62cards). Flags are set to 0 for cards not using a secondary DMA
63channel, or to 0x10 + C to specify channel C.
64.Pp
65The driver works best with WSS/MSS cards, which have a very clean
66architecture and an orthogonal set of features.
67They also happen to be
68among the cheapest audio cards on the market.
69.Pp
70The driver does its best to recognize the installed hardware and drive
71it correctly, so that you don't have to give too many details in
72.Pa /boot/device.hints .
73For PCI and ISA PnP cards this is actually easy
74since they identify themselves.
75For legacy ISA cards, the driver looks
76for MSS cards at addresses 0x530 and 0x604 (obviously, unless overridden
77in
78.Pa /boot/device.hints ) .
79.Sh IOCTL
80The driver supports most of the Voxware ioctls(), and most
81applications work unmodified (including popular mpeg players and linux
82binaries). A few
83differences exist (the most important one is the ability to use
84memory-mapped access to the audio buffers). As a consequence, some
85applications may need to be recompiled with a slightly modified
86audio module.  See /usr/include/sys/soundcard.h for a complete
87list of the supported ioctls.
88.Sh SUPPORTED CARDS
89Below we include a list of supported codecs/cards.
90If your sound card
91is not listed here, it may be supported by a bridge driver.
92.Bl -tag -width 2m
93.It CS4237, CS4236, CS4232, CS4231 (ISA)
94All these cards work perfectly in full duplex using the MSS mode.
95This chipset is used, among others, on the A/Open AW35 and AW32, on
96some Intel motherboards, and (the CS4231) on some non-PnP cards.
97.Pp
98The CS4232 is reported as buggy in the Voxware documentation but
99I am not sure if this is true.
100On one of my Intel motherboards,
101capture does not work simply because the capture DMA channel is
102not wired to the ISA DMA controller.
103.It Yamaha OPL-SAx (ISA)
104Works perfectly in all modes.
105This chip is used in several PnP cards,
106but also (in non-PnP mode) on motherboards and laptops (e.g. the
107Toshiba Libretto).
108.It OPTi931 (ISA)
109The chip is buggy, but the driver has many workarounds to make it work
110in full duplex because for some time these were the only full duplex
111cards I could find. u-law formats uses U8 format internally because of
112a bug in the chip.
113.It Trident 4DWave DX/NX (PCI)
114.It ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370/1371 (PCI)
115Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI is supported as well.
116.It ESS Solo-1/1E (PCI)
117.It NeoMagic 256AV/ZX (PCI)
118.El
119.Sh FILES
120The following commonly used symbolic links to real device nodes
121should be present:
122.Pp
123.Bl -tag -width /dev/sequencer -compact
124.It Pa /dev/audio
125Sparc-compatible audio device
126.It Pa /dev/dsp
127Digitized voice device
128.It Pa /dev/dspW
129Like
130.Pa /dev/dsp ,
131but 16 bits per sample
132.It Pa /dev/midi
133Raw midi access device
134.It Pa /dev/mixer
135Control port mixer device
136.It Pa /dev/music
137Level 2 sequencer interface
138.It Pa /dev/sequencer
139Sequencer device
140.It Pa /dev/pss
141Programmable device interface
142.El
143.Pp
144Each symbolic link refers to a device node of the same name,
145but with a unit number appended.
146The unit number for each device matches the unit number of the
147device probed at boot time.
148Device probe messages can be examined with the
149.Xr dmesg 8
150utility.
151.Sh DIAGNOSTICS AND TROUBLESHOOTING
152.Bl -tag -width 2m
153.It ac97: dac not ready
154AC97 codec is not likely to be accompanied with the sound card.
155.It unsupported subdevice XX
156A device node is not created properly.
157.El
158.Sh BUGS
159Some features of your cards (e.g. global volume control) might not
160be supported on all devices.
161.Sh HISTORY
162The
163.Nm
164device driver first appeared in
165.Fx 2.2.6 ,
166rewritten in
167.Fx 4.0 .
168.Sh SEE ALSO
169.Xr csa 4 ,
170.Xr gusc 4 ,
171.Xr sbc 4 ,
172.Xr devfs 5
173.Sh AUTHORS
174.An Luigi Rizzo Aq luigi@iet.unipi.it
175initially wrote the
176.Nm
177device driver and this manual page.
178.An Cameron Grant Aq gandalf@vilnya.demon.co.uk
179totally revised the device driver.
180.An Seigo Tanimura Aq tanimura@r.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
181revised this manual page.
182