IOAudio2Device

IOAudio2Device is a kernel-extension for playing (and recording?) audio.

It's interacted with exclusively by CoreAudio, so it can't be used directly if CoreAudio is in the picture.

(Info on this page may not be perfectly accurate)

Service properties

The most important ones are "input streams", "output streams" and "controls" which specify which streams/controls the driver provides.

See ioreg dumps for full information.

Methods

Selector	Action	Input	Output
0	start	-	-
1	end	-	-
2	setControlValue	uint32_t controlId, uint32_t value	-
3	? acknowledge config change ?	struct IOAudio2DeviceEvent	-
4	setSampleRate	uint64_t sampleRate (fixed-point 32.32)	-
5	setStreamFormat	uint32_t streamId, struct AudioStreamBasicDescription (officially documented)	-
6	setStreamActive	uint32_t streamId, uint32_t active	-

Notifications

Notifications are registered via IOConnectSetNotificationPort, they are sent on any audio event.

struct IOAudio2DeviceNotification {
  <standard message header (ID is unknown, ignored by CoreAudio)>
  // note: no NDR

  uint32_t refCon; // passed to IOConnectSetNotificationPort
  uint32_t numEvents;
  IOAudio2DeviceEvent events[numEvents];
};

struct IOAudio2DeviceEvent {
  uint32_t id;
  uint32_t type; // 4cc, e.g. 'goin'
  uint32_t args[6];
};

Some known events are:

Type	Description	Id	Args
'goin'	Sent after start is called	0	-
'halt'	Sent after end is called	0	-
'prop'	Sent after property is changed	0 or stream id	property (?), scope (?), 0 (?)
'cval'	Sent after control value is changed	control id	new value
'conf'	Sent after any configuration changed (in addition to above notifications)	0	???

Mapped memory

The following memory can be mapped via IOConnectMapMemory:

Type	Size	Description
0	Single page?	struct IOAudio2DeviceStatus
0x10000000 + streamId	from service property "io buffer frame size", multiplied by sample size	stream's sound buffer

Note: Typically, streamId is 1 for input (sound recording) and 2 for output (sound playback).

where

struct IOAudio2DeviceStatus {
  uint64_t bufferSampleStart; // the sample that the stream buffer starts with
  uint64_t bufferTime; // the timestamp of the stream buffer's start. (mach_absolute_time)
  uint64_t ???;
};

Operation

Once audio is started, the driver periodically reads some data from the output buffer and plays it. It zeroes the data after reading it (so that silence is played if the buffer is being neglected by user-land)

Once the driver finishes going over the entire output buffer, it adds the amount of samples in the buffer to bufferSampleStart and updates bufferTime to the current time.

The output buffer sample format is typically 16-bit PCM stereo.

(input sound buffer operation is likely similar but with writing instead of reading).