On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Jamie Lokier<jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > But that doesn't explain why new kernels every few months behave so > differently on my Intel HDA laptop. > Because a patch that makes sound work on one laptop can break sound on another laptop. Due to the design of HDA, the only way to guarantee this won't happen is to regression test each patch on every single make and model of PC on the market. > Hopefully someone will produce laptops that use standard-ish USB sound > internally sometime, like they already do with Bluetooth, Wifi and > memory card readers. > Those are not 100% standardized either. Hardware vendors like it this way, it allows them to market the "value added" features of their systems ;-) > Certainly I'll be testing my next laptop with distro CDs before buying > it, if the next one comes with Intel HDA. In theory HDA is a good > idea but it's a mess in practice. > It's not even a good idea in theory. HDA was designed by Intel and Microsoft. The HDA "spec" allows so much variation from one model to the next that even on Windows, a vendor driver is usually needed to make sound work. In theory the BIOS is supposed to tell a generic driver how the audio is internally wired up on a given chipset. In practice vendors skip this step because it's cheaper to put that info in the .ini file of the vendor's Windows driver. It's almost as if HDA was designed to make sound support on non Microsoft OSes as difficult as possible. But we all know Microsoft would never do a thing like that ;-) Lee ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
