xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/pcm.4 (revision 7773002178c8dbc52b44e4d705f07706409af8e4)
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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.
87See
88.In sys/soundcard.h
89for a complete list of the supported ioctls.
90.Sh SUPPORTED CARDS
91Below we include a list of supported codecs/cards.
92If your sound card
93is not listed here, it may be supported by a bridge driver.
94.Bl -tag -width 2m
95.It CS4237, CS4236, CS4232, CS4231 (ISA)
96All these cards work perfectly in full duplex using the MSS mode.
97This chipset is used, among others, on the A/Open AW35 and AW32, on
98some Intel motherboards, and (the CS4231) on some non-PnP cards.
99.Pp
100The CS4232 is reported as buggy in the Voxware documentation but
101I am not sure if this is true.
102On one of my Intel motherboards,
103capture does not work simply because the capture DMA channel is
104not wired to the ISA DMA controller.
105.It Yamaha OPL-SAx (ISA)
106Works perfectly in all modes.
107This chip is used in several PnP cards,
108but also (in non-PnP mode) on motherboards and laptops (e.g. the
109Toshiba Libretto).
110.It OPTi931 (ISA)
111The chip is buggy, but the driver has many workarounds to make it work
112in full duplex because for some time these were the only full duplex
113cards I could find. u-law formats uses U8 format internally because of
114a bug in the chip.
115.It Trident 4DWave DX/NX (PCI)
116.It ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370/1371 (PCI)
117Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI is supported as well.
118.It ESS Solo-1/1E (PCI)
119.It NeoMagic 256AV/ZX (PCI)
120.El
121.Sh FILES
122The following commonly used symbolic links to real device nodes
123should be present:
124.Pp
125.Bl -tag -width /dev/sequencer -compact
126.It Pa /dev/audio
127Sparc-compatible audio device
128.It Pa /dev/dsp
129Digitized voice device
130.It Pa /dev/dspW
131Like
132.Pa /dev/dsp ,
133but 16 bits per sample
134.It Pa /dev/midi
135Raw midi access device
136.It Pa /dev/mixer
137Control port mixer device
138.It Pa /dev/music
139Level 2 sequencer interface
140.It Pa /dev/sequencer
141Sequencer device
142.It Pa /dev/pss
143Programmable device interface
144.El
145.Pp
146Each symbolic link refers to a device node of the same name,
147but with a unit number appended.
148The unit number for each device matches the unit number of the
149device probed at boot time.
150Device probe messages can be examined with the
151.Xr dmesg 8
152utility.
153.Sh DIAGNOSTICS AND TROUBLESHOOTING
154.Bl -tag -width 2m
155.It ac97: dac not ready
156AC97 codec is not likely to be accompanied with the sound card.
157.It unsupported subdevice XX
158A device node is not created properly.
159.El
160.Sh BUGS
161Some features of your cards (e.g. global volume control) might not
162be supported on all devices.
163.Sh HISTORY
164The
165.Nm
166device driver first appeared in
167.Fx 2.2.6 ,
168rewritten in
169.Fx 4.0 .
170.Sh SEE ALSO
171.Xr csa 4 ,
172.Xr gusc 4 ,
173.Xr sbc 4 ,
174.Xr devfs 5
175.Sh AUTHORS
176.An Luigi Rizzo Aq luigi@iet.unipi.it
177initially wrote the
178.Nm
179device driver and this manual page.
180.An Cameron Grant Aq gandalf@vilnya.demon.co.uk
181totally revised the device driver.
182.An Seigo Tanimura Aq tanimura@r.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
183revised this manual page.
184