PSARC 2008/261 EOF: Sound Blaster Pro driver sbpro

[Garrett D'Amore]

Roland Mainz wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>   
>> Roland Mainz wrote:
>>     
>>> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>>>       
>>>> This case was approved yesterday.
>>>>         
>>> Erm... did you check whether this driver may be needed by software
>>> emulators ? For example the only sound driver which AFAIK works in Bochs
>>> with Solaris as guest is "sbpro" (see
>>> http://www.koders.com/cpp/fid1239096CB8FECB28659D1411619E101856D78C07.aspx
>>> ; and did you check "qemu", "VMware", "Parallels" etc. yet ?).
>>>       
>> Yes, for some of these, sbpro is required.  But the mainstream VMs have
>> moved on to newer emulations:
>>
>> Notably:
>>
>> * VirtualBox: emulates AC'97
>> * Parallels: emulates AC'97
>> * VMware: emulates AudioPCI, audio not supported on Solaris today -- may
>> add AudioPCI driver for it in the future
>> * VirtualPC: Microsoft product, does not support Solaris (at least
>> officially)
>> * qemu: May require sbpro or audiopci -- some evidence that it may also
>> support ac'97.  (Vanishingly small market share.)
>>     
>
> Erm... we have a QEmu projet at opensolaris.org - did you ask them
> whether they like the removal ?
>   

No.  But I wasn't aware of it until you just mentioned it.  I'll ask 
there now.  If it turns out that removal is problematic, I can always 
just drop the case.  (But sbpro is painful because its a closed source 
driver without any open source alternatives, and would seriously hamper 
our efforts to integrate OSS.)

    -- Garrett
>   
>> * bochs: Does anyone actually *care*?  It requires OSS in any case, so
>> would not represent a regression.  (Notably the sb16 emulation in bochs
>> is very close to unusable due to heave CPU requirements.)
>>     
>
> That's why I added --enable-idle-hack to Bochs long ago to deal with the
> CPU hogging, together with all the other fixes to make Solaris bootable
> on Bochs (e.g. SPARC as host, x86 as guest) ...
>
> ----
>
> Bye,
> Roland
>
>