Creative e drivers linux

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Após os desenvolvimentos lamentáveis de suporte por parte da creative, lembrei-me desta notícia, e em seguimento a X-Fi Driver Only Supports 64-bit Linux

Creative Tries Again At Linux Drivers


Next to drivers for graphics cards and (Atheros and Broadcom) wireless chipsets, the Creative Labs X-Fi series is one of the most complained about pieces of hardware for its Linux support or there the lack of. The Creative X-Fi sound card series is a few years old, but it wasn't until a few months ago that open and closed-source drivers started coming about for this hardware. However, this sound card has still been left in a sorry state, but this week Creative Labs has finally pushed out another Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux beta driver. But does this driver correct their wrong doings from the past?


Since the first half of 2006, Creative Labs has been stating their intention of providing an X-Fi driver that supports Linux with full capabilities for ALSA and OpenAL 1.1 with EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions). Their plans were to provide this closed-source driver in the second quarter of 2007, but then come Q2'07 they had duped Linux for Microsoft Vista. It had taken Creative Labs more resources to develop a Vista-capable driver than they had anticipated and as a result, their Linux driver development suffered with their release schedule being pushed back by several months.

Finally in September we found out that an X-Fi Linux driver was coming soon but as a beta release. On September 24, 2007 that driver was finally delivered but it in a horrific state. This closed-source X-Fi beta driver had only supported x86_64 Linux (read: no support for all of the 32-bit Linux users) and hadn't even worked with GCC 4.x. In addition, the driver had its share of other bugs.​
Months went by after that release with no signs of another beta, but back in February of this year, 4Front Technologies had announced an update to the Open Sound System (OSS) with initial support for the X-Fi series. Unlike support for some of the other sound cards on the market, the X-Fi support in its (sbxfi) driver wasn't reverse-engineered but Creative Labs had provided some source-code and header files to 4Front Technologies (Open-Source Creative X-Fi Support). These code files though had confidential markings, but two days later it was found out that this was legal and Creative Labs is interacting with both the OSS and ALSA projects. They had finally joined the open-source bandwagon.

After seeing this Open Sound System support and anticipating Sound Blaster X-Fi support for the forthcoming ALSA 1.0.17 release, we thought the Creative closed-source driver might just be dead. However, this week a second unsupported beta driver has finally been released. This driver supports the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, XtremeGamer, Fatal1ty, Platinum, and Elite Pro models. It supports ALSA mixing, recording, and PCM playback, while the new features in this beta release is support for GCC version 4 and Linux 32-bit distributions. Major issues still not addressed are S/PDIF pass-through support and compatibility with external I/O modules.​
The Linux "XFiDrv" is at version 1.18 for this beta release. We are in the process of testing out this driver and we will report back if there's anything interesting to hear. There is no report yet what other bugs this beta driver might have addressed. Now that there is GCC 4.x and 32-bit support, this may be a good temporary driver until the open-source X-Fi support matures. For X-Fi sound card owners, this driver can be downloaded from the Creative Open-Source Wiki.​
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Lamentável... mas melhorou um bocadito.
 
Just a few hours after publishing A Year Later, X-Fi Drivers Still Horrific for Linux, believe it or not but we have a new Creative X-Fi driver. ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, now has an experimental Creative X-Fi driver. Takashi Iwai, a developer at Novell/SuSE, has ported the open-source X-Fi driver (named sbxfi) found in the Open Sound System (OSS) over to ALSA.

Before all Creative X-Fi sound card owners go and download this driver, it was written by Takashi very quickly and is based solely on the Open Sound System's code. Furthermore, Takashi doesn't have an X-Fi sound card so he doesn't even know if the driver will do anything at this time. This new Creative X-Fi driver for ALSA should be considered highly experimental. This driver can be obtained through git and the details are described on the ALSA development mailing list.

Takashi had only begun porting the X-Fi driver to ALSA that morning. On the ALSA mailing list he describes the sbxfi driver in OSS as being "half-baked" with a number of limitations, but as the code is short, it's easy to port even without Creative's APU documentation.
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AndreAPL, o port é algo, sim. Mas é praticamente insignificante... inútil. Primeiro porque é completamente não-testado. Segundo porque se baseia no do OSS.

Não percebo a excitação (dos tipos do phoronix), tendo em conta que o do OSS é isto:

Limitations of the SB X-Fi driver of OSS

The current SB X-Fi driver included in Open Sound System is based on a simple MS-DOS based manufacturing test program developed for the card. This program provided very limited number of features. For this reason the OSS driver is also limited to just one playback and recording device that operate at fixed sampling rate (other rates are implemented in software).
In addition at least the follwing limitations are known:

There are dozens of different SB X-Fi models. Only few of them are recognized by the driver. The others (including the PCI-E models) are not known by the driver and it's very unlikely that they will work.

Even the recognized models may fail in some systems.

For the above reasons the SB X-Fi driver of OSS is provided as-is. It doesn't have any kind of warranty. No technical support is available from 4Front Technologies. We have no plans to do any further development on the driver. However it might be possible that in the future some volunteers contribute a better SB X-Fi driver to Open Sound System.
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A melhor solução continua a ser comprar uma placa 5.1 baratunxa que seja completamente funcional.
 
Última edição:
The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.
Back in June of 2006, Creative Labs has shared they were working on X-Fi Linux support and expected to release the driver for it in the second quarter of 2007. While it was almost a year out at that time, Creative promised full ALSA support and OpenAL 1.1 support with EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions). In May of 2007, Creative Labs then admitted they duped Linux for Microsoft Vista. Rewriting their Windows drivers to support the Microsoft Vista operating system had taken more time and resources than expected, so they had postponed their Linux work as a result.​
In September of 2007, which was two years after the Sound Blaster X-Fi family was originally introduced, Creative Labs finally delivered a Linux driver. This driver was binary-only and it only supported 64-bit Linux. Some manufacturers will just push out 32-bit drivers, but with this first Creative had instead just published a 64-bit driver. This driver also required an older version of GCC and hadn't worked nicely with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions of the time.​
This February though Creative Labs had provided 4Front Technologies with X-Fi source headers and other documentation to help them in writing an open-source driver for the Open Sound System. This OSS driver wasn't perfect though and had its own share of problems. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) was without any Creative X-Fi support.​
Creative's latest attempt at delivering a reliable binary driver was in April when they tried again by releasing a new beta driver. A year after they released their first binary Linux driver, the state of Creative X-Fi on Linux was a horrific mess. Following that, a Novell developer then began porting the Open Sound System X-Fi driver to ALSA, but it wasn't in the best shape possible and the developer didn't even have any X-Fi hardware.​
Creative's X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.​
The Creative XFiDrv 1.00 driver supports the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, XtremeGamer, Fatal1ty, Platinum, Elite Pro, and Titanium series. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording, and ALSA mixing. The current limitations for this driver are external I/O modules not being supported. The announcement was made on the Creative Forums and the full source-code is available for download from their support area (it is named XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz).​
It appears that this source-code driver is improved beyond their latest binary driver release. Many of the files making up this driver have comments reflecting dates after the last binary driver release in April. We are in the process of testing out this new driver and we will report back if there is any more information to share. Already this driver is known to cause a kernel oops on Fedora 9.​
Now time to get this driver into ALSA...​

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Mais uma vitória do OpenSource ?
 
Já tinha visto isso há umas horas atrás e fiquei :eek: pois a creative tendo o historial que tem com drivers e depois da novela danielk com os drivers do vista não tava nada à espera que eles fizessem isto...
 
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