audio: /dev/dsp, AudioEngine, and an AC'97 under it

A program that wants to make a sound opens /dev/dsp, writes PCM, and closes
it. That is what UNIX audio has always been and it now exists here:

    tone 440 2

Three pieces, in the order a sample passes through them. **/dev/dsp** is a
character device where write() is audio and a handful of OSS ioctls say what
the samples are. **AudioEngine** is everything above a driver that is not
specific to a chip -- the format, whether there is room, and what a write does
when there is not. **A driver** is bound by class, exactly as a display driver
is: device_find_class(DEVCLASS_AUDIO).

OSS numbering rather than something new, because every UNIX audio program ever
written already knows it and the only thing a different set would achieve is
making ports harder. They are read/write ioctls, which is the part that
matters: a program asks for 44100, the device sets 48000 and writes 48000
back, the program resamples. One that ignores the answer plays 9% fast, and
that is its bug rather than the driver's.

**The engine is deliberately one stream.** Mixing several programs is a real
feature with a real design behind it, and building it before anything had
played a single sound would be exactly what docs/plan/1.0.md keeps a register
for: work that exists and is connected to nothing. The second program that
wants to play at the same time is what should cause it to be written.

**audio_wait() sleeps on the timer tick, not on the device.** That looks like
the lazy choice and is not: a ring that drains is a ring with room, so asking
again in ten milliseconds always makes progress, whereas sleeping on the card
makes audio depend on an interrupt arriving. On a machine whose line is
misrouted that is not a stutter, it is a writer that never wakes. The handler
still accounts for finished buffers -- deleting it would cost efficiency, not
correctness -- and it retires descriptors through the same `tail` pointer
queue() uses, so the two cannot disagree about what is in flight.

**AC'97 first because HDA is two unproven things at once.** It is the simplest
audio device that exists on real machines and in QEMU both. Intel HDA is what
the laptop actually has and is a much larger driver; writing it against an
interface nothing had ever played through would have meant debugging the
driver and the interface simultaneously. HDA arrives as a second
struct audio_ops and nothing above it changes -- which is the entire point of
the class.

Two things the wiring needed: PCI class 0x04 now maps to DEVCLASS_AUDIO (the
driver bound and /proc/devices showed it, but audio_get() found nothing,
because the class byte had never been translated), and include/x86.h grew
inw() -- AC'97's mixer is all 16-bit registers and reading one a byte at a
time returns the low half twice on some codecs.

**Tested by measuring what came out, not by not crashing.** QEMU's wav backend
writes the guest's audio to a file; `tone 440 2` produced 1.97 seconds of
44.1 kHz stereo with peak amplitude 14177 against the generator's table
maximum of 14178, and 880 zero crossings per second -- 440 Hz exactly. wav is
on every QEMU target rather than a host backend, because a build machine may
have no sound card and it is the only backend whose output can be checked.

Both supported configurations: one boot each, no traps, no panics, socktest
and memfdtest green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-24 14:23:13 +02:00
commit 9fea18b18b
18 changed files with 1110 additions and 5 deletions

View file

@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ static const char *class_names[DEVCLASS_NCLASS] = {
[DEVCLASS_STORAGE] = "storage",
[DEVCLASS_NET] = "net",
[DEVCLASS_BUS] = "bus",
[DEVCLASS_AUDIO] = "audio",
};
const char *