Surround Sound on SPARC?

I'm about ready to integrate the Audigy LS audio driver, which is a PCI add-in card that is capable of 5.1 surround sound. (I've been working on it in the "off" hours, as I currently have other higher priority projects that I'm working on while doing work on Sun's nickel; this explains why it has taken so long.)

I have one quick question: does anyone really want to have this work on SPARC systems? The only tangible advantages I could see for this are:
  • If your internal audio device is busted, there is another alternative.
  • If you have some compelling reason to want surround sound support on your SPARC system.
Right now because the effort to qualify and integrate takes a while, and because I hate the idea of integrating bloatware that nobody is going to use, I am not planning on integrating SPARC support for this driver. However, if at least one or two people speak up and tell me that this is something that they want, then I'm much more likely to take the time to do the work. (The driver should Just Work on SPARC, its mostly a matter of running the tests, which take a few hours.)

So, if this is something you want, let me know!

Comments

Ludovic Orban said…
Maybe you could just upload a binary somewhere and check how many times it gets downloaded?
August 24, 2009 at 1:49 PM
Unknown said…
That would mean putting it somewhere where I can track downloads. Right now I don't have an easy way to do that. (I know its not a *hard* problem, I just don't have any site close at hand.)

Asking the question is the easiest thing. Unless someone tells me they want it, I am not going to bother setting up to build SPARC binaries.
August 24, 2009 at 2:13 PM
Anonymous said…
Although I don't currently have a SPARC workstation as I have an Ultra 20 I am hoping to pick up a SPARC workstation of eBay soon (and hope they come back in the future). It would be a shame not to integrate this an improve the native support rather than having ppl hunting around the net looking for drivers.
August 24, 2009 at 6:46 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SP (nanomsg) in Pure Go

I'm pleased to announce that this past weekend I released the first version of my implementation of the SP (scalability protocols, sometimes known by their reference implementation, nanomsg ) implemented in pure Go . This allows them to be used even on platforms where cgo is not present.  It may be possible to use them in playground (I've not tried yet!) This is released under an Apache 2.0 license .  (It would be even more liberal BSD or MIT, except I want to offer -- and demand -- patent protection to and from my users.) I've been super excited about Go lately.  And having spent some time with ØMQ in a previous project, I was keen to try doing some things in the successor nanomsg project.   (nanomsg is a single library message queue and communications library.) Martin (creator of ØMQ ) has written rather extensively about how he wishes he had written it in C instead of C++.  And with nanomsg, that is exactly what he is done. And C is a great choice for implement
Read more

An important milestone

Yesterday, with very little fanfare, illumos passed an important milestone. This milestone was the integration of  195 Need replacement for nfs/lockd+klm This is work that I originally tasked Gordon Ross and Dan Kruchinin to work while we were colleagues at  Nexenta .  Gordon started the work, picking up bits from FreeBSD as a starting point and gluing it to the illumos entry points.  Dan continued with it, and fleshed out a lot of the skeleton that Gordon had started.  It was subsequently picked up by the engineers at Delphix , and -- after some important bug fixing work was completed -- was integrated into their product quite some time ago -- reportedly its been stable since December in their product. The reason this is such an important milestone, is two fold: First, this represents a substantial collaborative effort, involving contributions from parties across several organizational boundaries.  The level of collaboration achieved here is a win for the greater good of th
Read more

The Hand May Be Forced

Well, as you may have read , Oracle has decided that at some point very soon, we're going to lose normal regular access to the source code for OS/Net. (I.e. the Solaris kernel and supporting programs.) While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle , it appears that Oracle doesn't value this. In fact, the exact words were from the management at Oracle were as follows: Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. While I understand the need to own the technology, there are few things that could be stated that show a stronger NIH attitude than this. Its unlikely that there will ever be a way for Oracle and the greater community to have a collaborative relationship. This is a dark day for OpenSolaris -- its effectively dead now. (Its parent, Solaris, lives on however.) How unfortunate. For Oracle that is. Because
Read more