ALSA: Writing the Soundcard Driver

Recorded December 7, 2023

View an interactive, complimentary Mentorship Session exploring ALSA: Writing the Soundcard Driver with Ivan Orlov, Software Engineer at Codethink

The sound subsystem is one of the oldest in the kernel, but the amount of documentation and talks about it is extremely low. This talk is aimed at revealing a few of its dark corners: the PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) layer and soundcard drivers.

This session will give you all necessary information required for comprehending the sound card drivers code and the Linux sound in general, including a few undocumented topics which I wish I knew before I started working in the ALSA subsystem. Additionally, I will show a couple of debugging tricks in the hands-on demo format!