Daniel Jacobowitz writes about problems he's having getting proper ALSA support for his desktop computer. Boy, does that sound familiar!
I myself have three computers that are partially or totally unsupported on ALSA:
- Apple iMac rev.D a.k.a. 333MHz G3 tray-loading iMac.
Partially supported by
snd-powermac, except that some controls are inverted and other controls just plain don't work. Probably something as simple as the wrong offset in the bitmap used to select the control on which to act. Bug filed in the ALSA BTS. No reaction.Anyhow, sound support for Apple products is being migrated to
snd-aop, which was written from scratch using a modular architecture that enables easily adding support for new sound chips. Nice idea, except that no effort is being put towards supporting pre-G4 products...Back when Ubuntu appeared on the Linux scene, Mark Shuttleworth agreed to pay a 500$ bounty to whoever made ALSA work on all PowerMac variants. Nobody took it, as far as I know. Those who are interested in taking on this challenge might wanna check my wiki page for our summary of the ALSA PowerMac situation.
- HP 9000 series model 712.
Recently supported, thanks to someone on the PA-RISC Linux mailing list having a go at coding it. Never merged by upstream ALSA, though. It's been a while since I gave it a try but, last time, only output worked.
- AMD Geode SCx200.
There is no
snd-scx200driver at all. Bug filed in the ALSA BTS. The issue of sound support on early Geode products was also mentioned on the Linux kernel mailing list, during the big OSS cleanup discussion so, at least, some people are aware of the issue.It so happens that the Geode SC is used in a number of popular embedded boards, such as the Soekris and yet, nobody tried porting the old OSS drivers available on AMD's Geode driver source page. Odd.
As we can see, there's plenty of ALSA support remaining to be coded, ported or cleaned up, and some people are willing to pay for the results. Who's gonna grab it?
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