FAQ010

From the ALSA wiki

The FAQs have been reorganized. The new location of this question is FAQ#Can I have OSS and ALSA modules loaded at the same time?

Can I have OSS and ALSA modules loaded at the same time?

It depends on whether you mean "OSS modules" to refer to OSS sound driver modules, which are from the old sound driver included in 2.4.x and earlier Linux kernels, or to OSS emulation modules, which are provided in the newer ALSA sound system as a compatible replacement for the old OSS sound driver.

OSS sound driver modules You can use either 1) modules from the ALSA sound driver or 2) modules from the OSS sound driver, but not both 1) and 2) at the same time. The only sound module that is allowed in the kernel at the same time as the ALSA modules is the "soundcore" module.

OSS emulation modules Since one of the aims of ALSA is to provide full OSS compatibility for OSS applications, there are OssEmulation modules available in ALSA (if you enable them) which emulate the old OSS sound driver. It is perfectly ok to have any of the three OSS emulation modules snd-pcm-oss and snd-mixer-oss and snd-seq-oss loaded at the same time as the ALSA driver modules because they are actually part of ALSA. They are harmless and do not interfere with the rest of ALSA. If you need ALSA's OSS emulation, load ALSA's OSS emulation modules; if you don't, leave them alone.

Recommended option: load ALSA's OSS emulation modules to emulate the OSS sound driver, and do not use the OSS sound driver modules.

How to tell ALSA modules from OSS driver modules All ALSA modules start with a prefix "snd-" or "snd_". Therefore if you own an emu10k1 based cards and you see "emu10k1" in the output of lsmod [not "snd-emu10k1"], then you have the OSS driver module loaded.. Which is, of course, bad if you want to run ALSA [s.a].