Cirrus Logic AC'97 Audio driver

1

Hi all,

I have been testing Haiku for a few years with VMware and have used BeOS as my desktop in the distant past. I also still maintain (have not done anything in years) a functional Tune Tracker system on BeOS. Linux is my main OS these days with a little XP which I try to avoid.

I decided to try the Haiku alpha bare metal on my Thinkpads. The R50e worked great… audio (oss/Intel HDA), video and very responsive. My older Thinkpad A22m worked very well also… vesa video at 1400x1050 was very fast. The audio driver was not loaded and I think it should work.

It’s a CS4297A / CS4624 combo. The CS4397A is a Cirrus Logic AC’97 Audio controller which with Linux uses the Intel AC97 module (snd-intel8x0). The CS4624 is for Sound Blaster compatibility and uses the snd-cs46xx module with Linux. Note only one driver can loaded at a time with Linux and both do work fine.

See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CS4624 and http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CS4297 for the details.

lspci and listdev show: Multimedia controller (Multimedia audio controller) [4|1|0] vendor 1013: Cirrus Logic device 6003: CS 4614/22/24/30 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator]

I only need audio playback working so either driver would be fine. I think the OSS driver should work. How do I force the driver? I would prefer to use the Live-CD since I’m just testing but if needed I can make a Haiku partition.

2

Doh… the oss driver is not included in the alpha .iso! I was also using the Senryu Distribution which does include the OSS driver so I just assumed the OSS driver would be included. I can’t wait until the new Senryu Distro based on the Haiku alpha is released. I would have expected the OSS audio driver to be included by default since it has huge list of supported audio cards. Pretty big oversight not including the most popular audio driver for an OS with an audio specialty like Haiku or at least was for BeOS.

3

It was not an oversight, but a conscious decision: the OSS port is a suboptimal solution that can (and does) interfere with native drivers. Also, as a general stance, Haiku focuses more on native solutions, even if it takes longer to get there.

4

Dear koki,

I have a CS4620 sound chip (Crystal SoundFusion) installed on IBM ThinkPad T20.
Do you have new information about test-driver for haiku?

Thanks in advance.
bampa

5

Being an audio standard, AC97, in a way, eliminates the need for external sound cards. However, many still find it necessary to add one. Preferences and progressions when it comes to a desired audio system, paves way for possible errors and incompatibilities, resulting to common and frustrating AC97 sound driver problems.