Sunday October 10, 2004 Solaris x86 Audio to open up customer ears
I received an enquire about the audio on my system which I use and I thought this will be of interest to many folks, so I'll give a rundown on what support you can expect to see in the Solaris x86 10 release. You can see I'm running XMMS to play a CD which I've ripped into MP3s, and at the same time I'm playing a Quicktime movie using mplayer. Yes, the kernel mixer is supported by the audio driver so you can play audio from more than one applications at at time.
I use the audio driver on various system, including Tyan 2885 motherboards with the AMD8111 controller on it, the Dell PowerEdge 650, and a Toshiba M2 laptop. It was such a thrill when my Tyan 2885 brought the speakers to life after installing Solaris 10 x86 build 66. The VIA VT823x support does work on the Acer Ferrari 3200 in 64-bit mode. What a sweet laptop to run the AMD64 port on.
There will be support for the AMD8111 and Intel ICHx. Sun hasn't been able to test all the flavors of the Intel ICHx devices as we don't have all of them, but the ones we've tested all work. The initial support was for the AMD8111 controller and the Realtek AlC655 as the codec. There is also support for VIA VT823x (VT8233, VT8235 and VT8237) controller(s) and any AC'97 compliant codec.
There are various chipsets that are compatible with the AMD8111 core controller, such as the Intel, and the ones I've been told are the Intel ICHx (Intel 8x0) and Nvidia MCPx.
I can say that the device driver team was able to come through with an incredible victory in being able to support the Sony Vaio laptops with the Intel ICHx chipset. These laptops suffer a very odd problem where many of the devices are tied into the same interrupt, and don't seem to get servicable interrupts for the audio device unless another device on the same interrupt is triggered. At least this is how I understand it, but I could certainly be wrong. The bottom line is that you could get audio working by copying a large file across the net, since the NIC was tied into the same interrupt, but once the file was done transfering the audio wouldn't work properly. Sun's device driver team overcame this limitation somehow and their driver does in fact work on Sony Vaio laptops which have the Intel ICHx chipset. This is the first audio driver that I know of that will work on these laptops. Do I hear a big round of applause coming out of my speakers as I type?;-)
I have also used Juergen Keil's hack to get the Unixware 7 version of the Realplayer 8 working on Solaris x86 10, and it works well. Many kudos to Juergen Keil, one of the long, long, Solaris x86 community members that has helped and written so much code to solve problems for our community over the past that I really couldn't even begin to list it here. He is truely one of the remarkable developers that the Solaris x86 community is blessed to have as a member. My hat is off to him! When I think of people that we owe a great deal of thanks to, Juergen is right up at the top of the list, just as Masa Murayama, yet another great asset to our community.
Juergen Keil also has Solaris x86 audio drivers which our community has relied upon for several years. This work pre-dated the work at Sun to provide audio drivers on the most recent release of Solaris x86.
Sun has also been looking at providing a richer API that would support surround sound and other nice features, but it's not clear when that might happen, AFAIK. The audio support provided in Solaris 10 x86 will work on a great deal of computers and provide basic audio functionality along with the ability to use the kernel mixer.
( Oct 10 2004, 10:30:10 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Atheros G wireless driver completes my laptop functionality
Wow, I finally have all devices working on my Toshiba M2 laptop
This is really something that people have not expected on Solaris x86, since many of the devices have not been supported in the past. Sun had also pulled laptop support from Solaris 9.
However, Solaris x86 Engineering is working on delivering the needed functionality that has been missing. This will allow our customers to use their laptops and similar systems in a Solaris, as well as a mixed, environment.
There is still work to do on wireless and this will delay the delivery until after Solaris 10 hits the street, but we should see wireless support in S10U1 or S10U2.
It really rocks to have wireless g working on my laptop (I have internal Atheros g).
( Oct 10 2004, 02:23:34 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]