Re: PC speaker driver

From: Ian Carr-de Avelon (ian@emit.pl)
Date: Wed May 10 2000 - 03:18:38 EST


David.Woodhouse@mvhi.com Wrote:
>avelon@emit.pl said:
>The original driver produced by Michael Beck used major 13. It was changed
>some time ago to register with the modular sound system as Yet Another
>Sound Card, and hence to be on major 14 with all the other sound card
>drivers.
Minor point:- What if I want both? This is not too artificial as one of
the things that has occured to me is that it should be possible to play
a test signal via the PC speaker, record that with a sound card and analyse
the recording to design a filter to add a lot of correction. I think part
of the general problem with the speaker driver is that progresively smaller
cheaper speakers have been put in by the makers, so generally only older PCs
give something approaching AM sound.

>
>> Is there any chance of geting PC speaker support into the stable
>> kernel distribution? It appears to me that the number of PCs which
>> have this feature warent it.
>
>It's been submitted to Linus on a couple of occasions. There was never a
>response, although rumour has it that he's not happy with the timer
>handling - a cleaner way of obtaining the 8253 timer would be to shift the
>system timer to use the RTC, making HZ a power of two in the process.
If we stick with grabing the present timer and get an interupt 8000
times a second, why not pass control to the kernel's interupt handler
only every 80th time, so it still receives 100Hz?
>
>avelon@emit.pl said:
>> In providing a place mark in the source tree, a driver working only
>> with the standard hardware would in any case allow unofficial patches
>> to remain useful for much longer than is the case at present
>
>As far as I'm aware, the patch for 2.2 hasn't been broken for some time. I
>haven't yet bothered to check it with 2.2.15. Someone ported it to 2.3 too
>- I'm less sure of the status of that, but I really ought to pick it up and
>start making sure it's OK.
I didn't actually find linux-patches.rock-projects.com until I started
looking through this group's FAQ. I see that the 2.0 and 2.3 patches
are not there, not good if that site is meant to be an authoritative one
which we are all awair of.
The latest Sound-HOWTO still reads:
" The software, which has not been updated for some time, can be found
   at ftp://ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de/pub/Linux/hu-sound/."

I get 9 Hunk FAILEDs patching 2.2.15 with patch-pcsp-soundcore-2.2.13.
Maybe there is a better version of patch out there? This is vanilla
Slackware 7.0
IMHO this really looks like Linux shooting itself in the foot here. CDs
with dissinformation are coming off the press every day. Anyone starting
into Linux has to be able to make an Internet connection and compile
a kernel before they can get a standard PC to wistle a tune. Time of a
skilled person made available to make Linux better is used to work out
where those hunks have to go now, when they would have simply been there
if this driver were part of the standard kernel tree.
In a nutshell end users are for 99% not getting something which is available,
and lots of people's time is being wasted. We should not underestimate
the importance of these issues.
Yours
Ian

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