alsa performance improvements

[Rockthesmurf]

Fantastic work, I always use OpenAL myself for mobile (where available) but it is ace that anything using ALSA gets a nice win.

At least on pandora OpenAL will most likely still go through ALSA - there are 2 ways to reach audio hardware on pandora, either ALSA or OSS emulation, everything else is placed on top of that. 

Ah, well that makes this update even better then. I did integrate direct ALSA support into my engine at one point (for a platform that didn't yet support OpenAL) and didn't realise that OpenAL just sits on top of it.

Out of interest, is it the view of yourself and Exophase that it could be optimized to a similar (although maybe not quite as much) extent event with multiple processes using the system? I have nothing in mind, just curious.

Forgot to say that case with multiple streams also has been improved:http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=openembedded.git;a=commitdiff;h=bb3feed69496c7d2e5145bc7dd0c406e4c10b5ea

Thanks, have had a look through the diff, changes look good (but what do I know!).