Apart from Kon­stan­tin (envy24* dri­ver author) I also got a p4 account for Yuriy (emu10kx dri­ver author). Let’s cross fin­gers for a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion in //depot/projects/soundsys­tem/ now…

Ryan got per­mis­sion to extend the work he did in the SoC as part of a class at uni­ver­sity. He wants to push down the new mixer stuff to the dri­ver level now. He does it in the emu10kx dri­ver (because he has such a card) and maybe in another dri­ver. This will allow to use a lot more of the fea­tures a card offers. Yuriy (author of the emu10kx dri­ver) has some work in the dri­ver sched­uled too, so I offered him a p4 account so that they can col­lab­o­rate. As of this writ­ting it is up to the p4 admins to grant an account.

And while I’m at it: Kon­stan­tin (env24* dri­ver author) got his p4 account already. He tries to get some time to com­mit his work in progress there.

Shaun had some unre­lated soft­ware prob­lems so he wasn’t able to do the paper­work requested by Real. Those prob­lems seem to be fixed and he expects to get some time to do the paper­work “soon”. Real is look­ing for­ward to this as the FreeBSD build is much bet­ter now.

In multimedia@ we have a dis­cus­sion about the envy24* chips. One ques­tion is how to con­vince com­pa­nies to pro­vide some tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion or at least free hard­ware sam­ples. As part of the answer I pointed to http://www.bsdstats.org/ which may be able to pro­vide some num­bers (e.g. envy24* chips with­out a match­ing dri­ver) which may help in nego­ti­at­ing some stuff with a com­pany. Unfor­tu­nately not many envy24 chips show up there. Part of the prob­lem may be that not enough peo­ple run the bsd­stats port (and enable peri­odic report­ing of at least the devices).

So do you have any unsup­ported hard­ware (not only lim­ited to sound­cards) or some hard­ware which is still up-to-date but lacks some fea­tures in the dri­ver (this is at least the case for all recent sound­cards like envy24* or HDA based ones)? Fine, run bsd­stats and enable the peri­odic report­ing. Maybe we are able to get enough num­bers to show to com­pa­nies so that they think it would be finan­cially ben­e­fi­cial to sup­port us in some way (free hard­ware, docs, tech­ni­cal hints, whatever).

Oh… while we are at it, the ALSA peo­ple added sup­port for some envy24 based cards based upon the reverse engi­neer­ing effort which was needed to write our dri­ver as it is now. So if you are work­ing for a com­pany and read­ing this: if you sup­port us, you get the Linux stuff for free too. And as an addi­tional bonus, you can show a work­ing dri­ver with­out any bad legal strings (e.g. GPL infec­tion) to OEMs. So go and cal­cu­late how much sales you can do with embed­ded stuff and come back to us with some tech­ni­cal hints and/or free hard­ware (it costs some few bucks for you to pro­vide this: not much if it fails but a large amount of return if it works out).

Ariffs changes two months ago to reduce the latency in the soundsys­tem also pre­pared the way for mul­ti­chan­nel sup­port and Yuriy added mul­ti­chan­nel record­ing to the emu10kx dri­ver (there are some bugs ATM and it is only a proof of con­cept to play around with it until we get real mul­ti­chan­nel sup­port in the generic sound code). Ryan tries to get some time (let’s cross fin­gers!) to con­vert a dri­ver (prob­a­bly the emu10kx dri­ver) to use the new mixer infra­struc­ture before he has to con­cen­trate on his stud­ies again.

This looks like we could get some very nice stuff this year.