ALSA was designed to use some features which were not, at the time of its conception, supported by OSS:
-Hardware-based MIDI synthesis.
-Hardware mixing of multiple channels.
-Full-duplex operation.
-Multiprocessor-friendly, thread-safe device drivers.
To provide these features cleanly, ALSA has a bigger and more complex API than OSS, so it can be harder to develop applications that use ALSA as their sound technology.
[^] # Re: Suppression d'OSS et état de l'audio sous Linux
Posté par gnumdk (site web personnel) . En réponse à la dépêche Des nouvelles du noyau Debian. Évalué à 3.
-Hardware-based MIDI synthesis.
-Hardware mixing of multiple channels.
-Full-duplex operation.
-Multiprocessor-friendly, thread-safe device drivers.
To provide these features cleanly, ALSA has a bigger and more complex API than OSS, so it can be harder to develop applications that use ALSA as their sound technology.