Audio Sharing

The Shared Audio framework allows guests to capture and output audio on devices connected to the hypervisor host. It does this by providing an audio virtual device through which guests can start and stop these operations and configure parameters such as sampling rate.

The host controls which operations are permitted for each guest, and which physical devices connected to the host can be accessed by each guest.

Note: This framework is considered mature because the VirtIO specification that defines the virtual device interface and the guest OS components that use this interface are not changing.

This chapter explains how the framework architecture allows the hypervisor to manage interaction between guests and audio devices, how to configure the audio device in a VM to make it available to a guest, and how to add the necessary framework components to the guests and host. It also describes the software layer that lets guests and the host share audio management information so they can duck, suspend, or pause their own audio streams to enforce system-wide audio management policies.