Are there any modern Linux distributions that still support /dev/audio?

I'm in the process of trying to debug a program that uses the legacy OSS /dev/audio interface to play sounds. However, Ubuntu and others no longer include a /dev/audio interface. Are there any relatively-modern Linux distributions that I could download in a virtual machine to test with?

2 Answers

If your computer uses PulseAudio (Ubuntu does), run the program via padsp:

padsp yourprogram

It will intercept attempts to open /dev/audio, /dev/dsp, and other related devices (using a LD_PRELOAD shared library) and send the sound directly to PulseAudio.

For systems that use plain ALSA, the equivalent is aoss from the "alsa-oss" package.

aoss yourprogram

aoss should work on Ubuntu too, since by default ALSA itself is rerouted through PulseAudio, but better use padsp in that case.

Most kernels also have the snd-pcm-oss module, which provides real /dev/dsp and /dev/audio devices using ALSA:

sudo modprobe snd-pcm-oss
yourprogram

I've heard it doesn't work as good as aoss, though, and I'm not sure whether it works at all when PulseAudio is running.

Support from /dev/audio was removed in Linux kernel version 4.15, so you want to look for a disto such as CentOS 7.x or anything based on an older kernel. Make sure you install the snd-pcm-oss and snd-mixer-oss kernel modules using modprobe.