From owner-freebsd-current Sat Dec 11 12:40:23 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from po4.wam.umd.edu (po4.wam.umd.edu [128.8.10.166]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 042F5151A9 for ; Sat, 11 Dec 1999 12:40:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from culverk@wam.umd.edu) Received: from rac10.wam.umd.edu (root@rac10.wam.umd.edu [128.8.10.150]) by po4.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA18321; Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:40:13 -0500 (EST) Received: from rac10.wam.umd.edu (sendmail@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by rac10.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id PAA24030; Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:40:10 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (culverk@localhost) by rac10.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA24026; Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:40:09 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: rac10.wam.umd.edu: culverk owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:40:08 -0500 (EST) From: Kenneth Wayne Culver To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Audio support [was Re: HEADSUP: wd driver will be retired!] In-Reply-To: <2436.944893104@zippy.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > The same thing is about to apply to the woxware sound code, we have a > > new shiny system that works and is much better designed... > > Actually, I'm sad to say that our shiny new sound system does *not* > work for some of the most popular audio chipsets on the market today > (where the older "luigi" sound system did support them) and this is a > matter of significant concern to some folks, myself included. I'll have to second you on that one, I've been applying patchs of my own as well as other's patchs to make my soundcard even detect. I used to be able to get my ViBRA16X to work using the Voxware drivers, but since the PnP changes, I've had to use pcm because Voxware will no longer detect my soundcard with the bios in PnP OS mode. (And when I turn PnP OS off, the OS won't boot) My modem which used to be detected simply as sio1, now won't even attach to the sio driver. > We're getting a larger population of people who expect FreeBSD to > simply continue to work from release to release, and this is not an > unreasonable expectation when you think about it. Unfortunately, when > we remove support for a piece of hardware which was formerly supported > (the aic driver being a good example) and this particular hardware > happens to be in those people's machines, well, it's easy to see where > "continuing to work" is no longer a claim we can make for FreeBSD's > progress in such cases. > > When this is also for some really old and grotty piece of hardware, > like floppy tape drives, and nobody is interested in actively > maintaining the driver for it, then that's a reasonably justifable > argument for taking that kind of public relations trade-off. When the > hardware in question is something that's currently being sold on the > open market and is still quite popular, like the SB16 PCI or Vibra16X > on-board audio chipset, then killing off support for it is quite > another thing. Both of those device currently refuse to work in any > of my -current test boxes and perhaps you should have chosen a better > example in making your argument. :-) > I agree, we need to start supporting that hardware that currently doesn't work, but used to work if we want to keep our user base growing (I personally have won 30 converts from Linux, and about 4 new users). ================================================================= | Kenneth Culver | FreeBSD: The best OS around. | | Unix Systems Administrator | ICQ #: 24767726 | | and student at The | AIM: AgRSkaterq | | The University of Maryland, | Website: (Under Construction) | | College Park. | http://www.wam.umd.edu/~culverk/| ================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message