[darkhelmet]

It amazes me how much time has passed since then. I would have to go and look up the history and events to remember what order things happened.

However, with my FreeBSD hat on, it should be pointed out that we had this wonderful fellow called Cameron Grant. He is largely responsible for FreeBSD's post-OSS audio system. FreeBSD could have gone several ways for audio at the time, but he made it work, and it worked well. It had virtual channels with in-kernel mixing with very low latency - with full API compatibility. Tragically, Cameron's time was cut short.

Over time, other people got involved and picked it up. The subsystem gradually progressed from the user perspective of being simple and Just Working, to something that is rather powerful today.

[md8z]

Indeed, the author of that comment seems to be confusing OSSv4 with Cameron Grant's newpcm, which was a separate thing. It was developed around the same time as ALSA but didn't have a new userspace API like ALSA and OSSv4 did.